ComputerInsanity

Habey’s no stranger to the diminutive PC arena, but the latest from the company just might be the one you’ve been scouting. If you’ve been scouting a mini PC that’s dead-silent, that is. The BIS-6620 is described as “an ultra-compact fanless and noiseless PC platform based on the Intel Atom Z510 processor,” measuring just 4.5- x 4.5- x 1.5-inches and offering up GMA 500 graphics, 1080p hardware decoding, a single DDR2 SODIMM memory slot, room for a 1.8-inch (iPod classic-sized), a few USB 2.0 sockets, integrated SD / CF card readers, gigabit Ethernet port, an optional WiFi module and your choice of OS (Windows XP Embedded, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 or Linux). There’s a fair chance this could double as a simplistic media player in your cramped studio apartment, and at just $299.99 at NewEgg, you won’t be shattering the bank in the process.

Facebook appears to have made a third acquisition — this one smaller than its two previous buys. What’s more, Facebook has shut down the company’s service immediately.

Octazen is a Malaysian company comprising two employees. It provides scripts to import a user’s contacts into a website upon sign up, reports Gigaom.

Why would Facebook acquire the makers of an address book importer? It appears to be a talent buy, with Facebook employing the team and shutting down their service (aka acq-hire-sition). Liz Gannes quotes Facebook’s Larry Yu explaining:

This is part of our ongoing effort to add experienced, accomplished technical talent to help drive the company forward in its efforts to be the central way for people to connect and share information.

A statement on the Octazen site reads:

The Octazen team wanted to let you, our valued customers, know that the company recently received an offer to acquire most of the company’s assets and to employ those assets in a different direction. After carefully evaluating this offer, our team believes this is a wonderful opportunity of which we must take advantage.

As a result, effective immediately, Octazen will no longer accept new service contracts or renew existing service contracts, and will enter a transition period to wind down operations.

Facebook’s previous two acquisitions — Parakey (a web operating system) and FriendFeed (FriendFeed) (social aggregation and search) — both added excellent engineers to the Facebook team at the cost of the original services. While FriendFeed still exists, it’s barely used and the site’s features have largely been merged into Facebook, to the disappointment of loyal FriendFeed users.

Our British readers will already be painfully familiar with the comical propensity that government officials (even spies!) have for losing sensitive data while on the move. It might be an idea, therefore, to give your forgetful local representative a break with one of these new Corsair USB drives. The Padlock 2 features OS-agnostic password protection via the keypad you see above plus 256-bit encryption of the data stored on the flash inside. So even if someone is tenacious enough to pry the case open, he’ll have a hard time getting anything useful out of it. Oh, and don’t worry about forgetting the passcode, there’s a procedure for wiping the drive clean and generating a new one. 8GB units are available immediately, and we’ve spotted them online priced at £46 in the UK and $59 in the good old US of A.

Corsair

When malware writers fail to generate clean, reliable code, just who can you trust? On the heels of many Windows XP 32-bit users facing blue screen of death errors and unwanted reboots, Microsoft is now confirming that there’s a little bit of malicious code sitting at the root of it all. A rootkit, to be specific, one called Alureon that compromises the atapi.sys file and others. This rootkit makes a system call via an address that, after the update, no longer corresponds to the particular call Alureon is trying to make. This is apparently the cause of the BSODs, not the update itself, and so those suffering from similar issues can resolve them by simply replacing corrupted system files via the recovery console.

Slashdot

Microsoft Malware Protection Center

Have you ever wondered how many oranges it would take to charge just a single Apple? Name games aside, we have to hand it to Imperial Leisure, the company that executed a new iPhone-centered advertisement aimed at raising awareness for Jaffa oranges. We won’t spoil the whole thing for you, but we will say that you’ll be far hungrier after watching than you are right now.

Thanks to the oh-so-revealing pages of the FCC, we already knew that ASUS had yet another multitouch-enabled Eee PC in the works, but there’s just nothing quite like the satisfaction of seeing an official portal launched to celebrate the reality of being. The Eee PC T101MT is a swivel-screen netvertible that packs a 10.1-inch resistive multitouch display (1,024 x 600), Windows 7, up to 2GB of DDR2 memory, Bluetooth 2.1+EDR, 802.11b/g/n WiFi, a 160GB or 320GB hard drive, 0.3 megapixel webcam and a 6.5 hour battery. You’ll also get a VGA output, a trio of USB 2.0 sockets, Ethernet audio in / out, an SD / SDHC / SDXC card reader (nice!) 500GB of internet-accessible ASUS WebStorage and your choice of white or black. Per usual, there’s nary of a mention of a price or release date just yet.

Google’s always tiptoed around directly providing internet access to consumers with things like free airport WiFi and the free WiFi network it runs in Mountain View, but today the company announced that it’s getting in the game for real with the launch of a fiber-based ISP service that’ll offer 1Gbps speeds at “competitive prices” to select markets. The idea is to provide next-gen access to between 50,000 and 500,000 people and basically see what happens — and, as you’d expect, the new network will be a poster child for Google’s pro-net-neutrality efforts. Sounds good to us, but we’ve all got a ways to go before Eric Schmidt comes over with the lightpipe — Google’s just now asking for “interested communities” to apply, and launch markets will be announced later this year.

P.S.- Remember when Google bought all that fiber back in like 2005 and sparked all those rumors of a “GoogleNet”? It’s probably unrelated, but at least there’s a name to kick around.

Google, Application page