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Japan crisis could cause severe delays in iPad 2 deliveries

Apple’s much awaited iPad 2 was launched  last week, but then luck isnt favoring the Cupertino company, after the iPhone 4 antenna gate and the missing white iPhone this time its the nature who has played spoilsport in the launch. With Apple sourcing some parts exclusively from Japan,  delays are expected in future batches of iPad 2. It is not known if Apple  if the parts in question are only supplied by a single vendor for iPad 2.

In the past Apple is known to source same parts from multiple vendors to add redundancy and avoid vendor problems impacting Apple’s schedule.  If Apple does have such an option, the delay will be considerably less, but it still remains to be seen. Currently Apple website says that the earliest they can ship iPad 2 is in 4-5 weeks time.

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RSA security not forthcoming on security breach

RSA security based out of San Francisco, whose networks and several workstations were compromised few days ago, hasn’t released much information about the level of information obtained by the attacker. RSA Security which provides two level authentication for many company’s intranet access from outside office premises  with a combination of  random number generated by Security Key fobs ( SecureId )  and user generated passwords.

RSA is probably the biggest name in Secure Access for work from home setup in many Fortune 500 companies and others.  RSA security is the data security arm of EMC storage group and was founded by the famous RSA ( Rivest, Shamir and Adleman) public key cryptography.

The way RSA has handled the issue has caused alarm in many quarters, without the details of what and how information was compromised many of its clients are afraid that the hacker(s) could target their infrastructure without warning. It appears that hackers had access to see key, which allows the attacker access to the random number generated by SecureId and also allows them to change user generated password as well.

Some of the financial institutions might disable the remote access for their users to prevent any attacks based on the compromised information.

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Mozilla likely to release ‘Firefox 4’

Mozilla is likely to release Firefox 4 on March 22, its Release Candidate was on March 9th. The browser has features like New Tab Location, Switch to Tab, Firefox button, App Tabs, Organize your tabs (feature that allows you to drag and drop tabs from tab clutter to manageable groups for naming and organizing in a different way), Manage your Add-Ons (is a small indicator on the top left which indicates you by slightly glowing when new mails/ any other notifications you recieve), Stay in Sync (which lets you to synchronize the settings, bookmarks, passwords, and other customiztion to multiple devices).

The browser also has features which are under the hood such as WebM and HD video (with HTML5 video standards), New JS values (for an efficient and better graphics viewing in the browser, it changes to C++ representation for the javascript values so that it can execute large amount of numeric code), Protecting your privacy, Multi-Touch support, 3D on the web, Retained layers (for faster scrolling for web pages with complexity), Audio API, XPCOM, Stylin’ Pages with CSS3 (for adding animations to web pages), Upgrading Forms, Fabulous Fonts, HTML5 support, Web Console, JetPack SDK (for easier developments of Add-Ons, also for installing the Add-Ons without the need to restart the browser), Full Hardware Acceleration (for a super-fast experience of graphics acceleration on Windows, Linux and etc., with Direct2D and Direct3D), Compartments, SVG as Images, Crash Protection (the browser provides an uninterrupted browsing for Microsoft SilverLight plugins, Adobe Flash and etc., even though a crash occurs and the page has to be restarted to reload the plugin), and HSTS (where the browser establishes a secure connection to the servers)