Project Natal became Microsoft Kinect

After several leaks, Microsoft has finally revealed the official name of Project Natal, “Microsoft Kinect”. For those who don’t know Kinect “introduces controller-free gaming with which you take full control of the games by simply moving around,jumping, punching and kicking or whatever you feel like doing”, it will also support video chat.

Kinect was officially unveiled at the Electronic Entertainment Expo 2010, known as E3 2010, which is an annual trade show for the computer and video games industry. The myspace Xbox page lists November as a possible release date.

Rumors are now circulating through the web that a Slim Xbox 360 will be unveiled soon since an ad for a 360 Xbox slim model appeared at an Italian website. It is expected that Kinect would be priced at around $ 150.

To know more about Microsoft Kinect (Formally Project Natal) you check the following sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinect
http://www.redmondpie.com/microsoft-kinect-for-xbox-360/
http://www.engadget.com/2010/06/13/microsoft-kinect-gets-official

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Sony Playstation used to crack password

The Cell chip has several  processing cores to do            number crunching

The powerful chip at the heart of Sony’s PlayStation gaming console has been used to crack passwords faster than ever before.

Security researcher Nick Breese used a PS3 to crack supposedly strong eight-character passwords in hours.

Typically, previous attempts to crack such passwords took days to get the same result.

Eight-character passwords are used to protect PDF and Zip files as well as those produced by Microsoft Office.

The work to turn the PS3 into a password cracker was  carried out by Nick Breese, who works for    Auckland-based Security Assessment.

The Cell processor at the heart of the PS3 is the key to speeding up the time it takes to crack a password.
In a presentation given at the Kiwicon security conference in mid-November, Mr Breese said a powerful Intel chip could crank through 10-15 million cycles per second.
The architecture of the Cell processor meant it could speed through 1.4 billion cycles per second. This speed boost was possible because each Cell chip had several processing cores – each one of which could be effectively trying passwords at the same time.
This was important when attempting “brute force” attacks that go through all possible combinations for a password.
Speaking to the Sydney Morning Herald, Mr Breese said although the PS3 could be used to crack eight-character passwords featuring letters and numbers, stronger encryption systems – such as those used to safeguard web transactions – remained safe.
Mr Breese’s research comes soon after work by Russian company Elcomsoft to use graphics cards to speed up password cracking.

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