In a roundtable with the European press, John Chambers confirmed the “end of life” of the Linksys name, being replaced by the new and redesigned Cisco branding.

This decision follows Cisco’s move last April to make it easier for Linksys resellers to add Cisco products to their offerings and vice versa. Also, just a few weeks ago, Cisco created a new division solely focused on the SMB market and headed by Rick Moran, formerly marketing chief of several Cisco communications applications like the unified communications portfolio, Cisco IPICS, Cisco Small Business Systems (Linksys One), TelePresence, Business Video and Physical security.

“It will all come overtime into a Cisco brand. The reason we kept Linksys’ brand because it was better known in the US than even Cisco was for the consumer. As you go globally there’s very little advantage in that”, said Cisco’s CEO.

Source: Cisco kills Linksys brand, plans agressive move into consumer markets (video)

Press Release
SanDisk Corporation and Sony Corporation today announced the development of the “Memory Stick Micro” format, an ultra-small IC recording media designed to meet the growing storage needs of highly compact, multifunctional mobile phones. Licensing for the development of “Memory Stick Micro” compatible hardware will begin October 3, 2005.

“Memory Stick Micro” media is approximately one-quarter the size of “Memory Stick PRO Duo” media, yet only about 1.2 mm thick. The media’s edges are slotted lengthwise to allow for more slim-line designed connectors to reduce space in host devices. As dual-voltage media, Memory Stick Micro supports devices operating at 3.3 volts and 1.8 volts.

Memory Stick Micro is designed as an externally removable media with a controlled eject function to prevent users losing the media. Users will be able to insert Memory Stick Micro into an adapter for exchanging data to a Memory Stick PRO compatible product.

Dr. Eli Harari, president and chief executive officer of SanDisk Corporation, said “The Memory Stick PRO format co-developed with Sony has become a highly successful product line for us due to its popularity with a wide range of consumer electronic products such as digital cameras and videogame consoles. Sony and SanDisk recognize the rapidly growing market opportunity for memory cards with multimedia mobile phones, and are joining forces to develop the ultra-small Memory Stick Micro format to foster development of extremely compact multimedia mobile phones”.

Akira Kubota, President of Micro Systems Network Company, Sony Corporation said “Sony’s collaboration with SanDisk Corporation has continued to develop since our initial announcement of the joint Memory Stick PRO format development in 2003. Today€„¢s joint announcement of the Memory Stick Micro format provides a new, versatile IC recording media for mobile products such as mobile phones for sharing entertainment and data.”

Since the September 1998 market introduction of Memory Stick, cumulative shipments of media have achieved 145 million units as of August 2005. In recent years, Memory Stick media has been used not only to store still images of digital still cameras and sharing data among PCs, but has also been widely used for entertainment purposes such as playing back video and music content. As mobile phones become more advanced with varied functions, including video and music playback, there is an increasing need for smaller, high-capacity media which this product addresses.

The Memory Stick Micro media will be made available in the first half of 2006.

Memory Stick Micro Specifications
» Dimensions: 15 x 12.5 x 1.2 mm, 225mm 3
» Connector Pin: 11-pin
» Maximum Capacity: 32GB (Theoretical)
» Max. Data Transfer Rate: 160 Mbps (Theoretical)
» Operating Voltage: 1.7 – 1.95 V and 2.7 €œ 3.6 V
» Interface: Serial I/F and 4-bit parallel I/F
» Operating Temperature: -25° – +85° C
» Copyright Protection Technology: MagicGate

Click here for the image.

Stumbled upon a site that has a news headline called “109-bit Encryption Broken”, after reading it, it is quite interesting, so I might as well share it with you all.
Here is it:

109-bit Elliptic Curve Cryptography knocked over with brute force

Academics yesterday scooped a $10,000 prize after using a
distributed computing network to decrypt a message scrambled using an 109-bit implementation of Elliptic Curve Cryptography. The success of Chris Monico and his team of mathematicians from Notre Dame in solving the Certicom ECCp-109 challenge was achieved using raw computing power to brute force the key. There’s no suggestion that either Certicom’s algorithm or Elliptic Curve Cryptography itself is flawed. Commercial versions of Certicom’s wireless encryption technology use 163-bit keys, which the firm estimates be one hundred million times harder to solve than ECC 109. Certicom’s higher strength 163-bit encryption toolkits are used by many firms in the IT industry including Cisco, Motorola and Palm.

The Certicom ECCp-109 challenge, first posed in 1997, was solved by the Notre Dam team using a network of 10,000 computers (mostly PCs) running 24 hours a day for 549 days. $8,000 of their $10,000 prize money was donated to the Free Software Foundation. The challenge was designed to encourage further research into security standards while placing ECC under third party scrutiny. It is hoped the experience gained from this challenge will help confirm comparisons of the security levels of public key systems such as ECC, RSA and DSA that have been based primarily on theoretical considerations. Certicom is offering $20,000 in prize money for the solution to the next challenge, which involves solving a 131-bit key that is expected to require several thousand times more computing power than the ECCp-109 Challenge.

Of course, RSA has been running factoring challenges relating to its encryption technology for some time. Prizes ranging from $10,000 for the 576-bit challenge to $200,000 for a 2048-bits conundrum. The RSA algorithm is based on mathematics of prime numbers. Its security relies on the well established difficulty of factorising the products of two large prime number, against the ease of multiplying these numbers in the first place.

ECC uses a similar idea taken from the mathematics of elliptic curves. ECC is particularly beneficial in applications where bandwidth, processing, or battery power is constrained such as security for handhelds, mobile middleware and other embedded devices.

Interesting.