Plantronics announces Calisto 800 Series

As most of you would know by now, driving around in your car while talking on the phone without a hands-free device of any sort is dangerous, not only to yourself but other road users as well. This is why there is such a thing known as a Bluetooth headset or a hands-free kit for your car, so stop being miserly and invest in one already. Of course, a hands-free kit isn’t only limited to in-vehicle use, but can also come in handy at home or in the office.

In case you’re short on ideas for a particular model, you can always look towards Plantronics and not go wrong. This manufacturer has been a pretty solid performer in the past, and their releases are full of quality as well. The latest would be the Calisto 800 Series, which is the first speakerphone in its unified communications product portfolio which will merge multi-device hands-free connectivity with intuitive visual call management.


Specially optimized for use with Microsoft Office Communicator and Lync, this series is meant for private and home office workers who depend on multiple communication devices in order for them to collaborate effectively. The Calisto 800 Series will comprise of the Calisto 825 that can manage calls between a PC and a cell phone, while a wireless microphone delivers unparalleled speakerphone audio quality and freedom of movement.

Not only will it simplify PC and cell phone call management courtesy of its intuitive visual display, it is also a snap to set up, taking less than 5 minutes to do so before you can switch between mobile and PC calls, dial, and mute across devices at the touch of a button.

The more professional among you can even walk around freely (within reasonable range, of course) and carry out your conversation without worrying about dropped calls or the ilk. If privacy is desired, you can always settle for a wireless lapel microphone or connect a Bluetooth or corded headset to the speakerphone.

Your ears should be able to tell the difference in audio quality, as they revel in premium sound with echo and advanced noise cancellation technology helping you obtain the best.

The Calisto 825 will retail for $259.95, while the Calisto 820 and Calisto 830 will retail for $179.95 and $199.95, respectively.

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Google's Video Play By dropping support for a common video format in Chrome, Google means to drive the Web toward one it owns.

Last week, Google stirred up controversy with a low-key announcement: in the near future, it would drop support for a widely used video format in its Chrome Web browser. Here's a primer on what Google is doing, why it's doing it, and how it will affect you.

What exactly did Google do?

Last Tuesday, the company announced on the blog for its Chrome Web browser that it plans to discontinue built-in support for the H.264 video format, which is used by many Web publishers. Google said that instead, it would adopt the free-to-use WebM, a multimedia format that Google has largely developed and funded itself.

How will this affect you?

It probably won't, unless you're one of the roughly one in 10 people who use the Chrome browser. Even then, you might not notice. What'll happen is that video clips embedded in Web pages using the new HTML

Today, most Web video is served not via a

Google has announced forthcoming WebM plug-ins for Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Apple's Safari. It's a given that Firefox will also play WebM videos. Several major chipmakers, including AMD, ARM, and Broadcom, have pledged to support the format, as has Adobe for its Flash player. But without WebM being available by default in Internet Explorer, one Microsoft evangelist likened Google's move to throwing its weight behind Esperanto. In response, Google has pledged to supply browser plug-ins for Internet Explorer and Safari that will enable them to automatically play WebM video.

Eventually, engineers could build downloadable add-ons for Chrome that would enable it to play H.264, circumventing Google's move altogether. So for now, Google's move won't have much of an effect. And importantly, if you have a Google-powered Android phone, nothing will change on your device.

Unlike Apple's refusal to support Flash players on its iPhones and iPads, Google's removal of H.264 support from Chrome will be much less high-profile. Google's massive YouTube site will still stream video in H.264 (except for users who click a button to opt to use WebM). "That Chrome has dropped H.264 is less important than YouTube [dropping it]," notes Informa analyst Andrew Ladbrook.

In that case, why is Google doing this?

The H.264 format is commercially licensed by an organization called MPEG LA. Companies that make video software and hardware pay license fees to MPEG LA in order to build H.264 support into their products.

Google's stated aim is to shift Web video away from H.264 and toward WebM, in order to drive the Internet toward a royalty-free standard over which Google would have a large influence.

Interestingly, MPEG LA's members include Microsoft and Apple, which are pushing for H.264 to be used as the standard format for the

There's already another royalty-free video format, Ogg Theora, supported by Mozilla's Firefox and other browser makers. But Microsoft and Apple have refused to build in support for it, and so far have not announced support for WebM. And Steve Jobs has written that he's concerned that Ogg Theora will invite patent lawsuits from other companies, which would undermine the point of using it.

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Smart Phone Zombie Apocalypse A researcher creates a botnet for your pocket—a likely sign of things to come.

If you have a smart phone, online criminals may soon have your number. Smart phone malware is getting increasingly sophisticated, and now a security researcher has created software that turns a smart phone into a "zombie" that can be controlled remotely.

Georgia Weidman created the program, which controls an Android phone via short message service (SMS). She will demonstrate the software at the Shmoocon hacking conference in Washington, D.C., later this month.

Once only theoretical, real-world cell-phone viruses are becoming more common. Last August, a scam in Russia tricked users into installing malicious software on Android phones, and using the SMS functionality to send messages to a number that charged a premium fee. In late 2010, a Chinese virus for Android devices was used to steal personal data.

Botnets, or networks of computers that have been compromised by cybercriminals, have become a staple of Internet crime. They can be used to attack other systems, host attack tools, send spam, or just steal data. So far this kind of approach has been rare with mobile devices, but that seems to be changing.

"We have been taking down Internet botnets for years now, but there is not as much understanding [of telecom networking]," Weidman says. "I definitely see criminals going more and more toward using the telco's network."

Weidman's attack works like this: After infecting a phone with a low-level program known as a rootkit, she uses that phone to send spam text messages, participate in a denial-of-service, or degrade the communications of the phone—all without the user knowing. The techniques apply to any smart phone, Weidman says, but she will use three different Android phones for her demo.

Today's smart phones have multiple layers of defense. For one, they can block malicious applications. They also have managed channels, such as the Apple App Store and Google's Android Marketplace, for applications.

As a result, Weidman says, infecting them is no easy task. "The hurdle with any malware is infecting the phone," she says, noting that the methods used by cybercriminals usually do not work. "More of what you see of malware is people downloading applications for their phone that are infected," she says.

Weidman's program is one of the first known to turn smart phones into nodes of a botnet.

The problem of cybercriminals targeting consumers' phones will only get worse, says Kevin Mahaffey, chief technology officer of mobile-security startup Lookout. Because the control of phones is so easy to turn into cash via premium text messages, criminals will be drawn to attack the devices.

"I always tend to look at the economics of the problem to ask myself whether it will continue in the future," he says. "And because there is an incentive for attackers to compromise mobile phones, and the cost of compromising is not that high, that says it will become more prevalent in the future."

Using the telecommunications network, rather than the Internet, for botnet control allows attackers to hide their actions from users. When the attacker does it using malicious software, the user has little chance of detecting it, says Weidman.

"When I infected a phone in my botnet—my lab botnet—with malware, the smart phone would receive a message through SMS and I would check to see if it has botnet instructions in it," she says. "If it does, it would perform the functionality requests, and then it would swallow the message, so the user does not know that there was a message at all."

While phones do not have the computing power of more traditional computers, they are hefty enough to handle many of the tasks that cybercriminals desire, she says. She adds that the sheer number of smart phones means that any botnet could be "a real threat."

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"SMS of Death" Could Crash Many Mobile Phones

The phones in many people's pockets today are miniature personal computers, and they are just as vulnerable as PCs to viruses, malware, and other security problems. But research presented at a conference in Germany last week shows that phones don't even have to be smart to be vulnerable to hackers.

Using only Short Message Service (SMS) communications—messages that can be sent between mobile phones—a pair of security researchers were able to force low-end phones to shut down abruptly and knock them off a cellular network. As well as text messages, the SMS protocol can be used to transmit small programs, called "binaries," that run on a phone. Network operators use these files to, for example, change the settings on a device remotely. The researchers used the same approach to attack phones. They performed their tricks on handsets made by Nokia, LG, Samsung, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and Micromax, a popular Indian cell-phone manufacturer.

A number of largely theoretical attacks aimed at iPhones and Android devices have made headlines over the past few years. But smart phones make up only 16 percent of the devices in use. So-called feature phones—which can do more than make calls but run only software with limited functionality, enabling their users to do such things as send text messages and play games—account for the majority of around 5 billion mobile phones in use worldwide.

Feature phones are harder to attack than smart phones because of their limitations. Their processors are less powerful, and they have less memory capacity, so they must run simpler software, which often cannot be loaded unless the carrier gives permission. Feature phones also have more varied hardware and software idiosyncrasies than smart phones do.

The security researchers who presented their work at last week's conference, Collin Mulliner, a PhD student in the Security in Telecommunications department at the Technische Universitaet Berlin, and Nico Golde, an undergraduate student at the same institution, decided to attack feature phones over the air. They set up a miniature cellular network, using open-source software to create a base station with which to communicate with the phones. In order to broadcast malicious messages to them without putting other devices at risk, they shielded their communications by enclosing their network in a Faraday cage, which blocks radio signals.

Having a private cell network also helped Mulliner and Golde study the software running on low-end phones. By monitoring the way the phones communicated with their base station, they could discern important information about how the phones worked and how SMS messages could affect them.

The researchers were able to create malicious SMS messages for each type of phone they studied. The messages affect the phones without any response from the user. Because feature phones are so common, Mulliner says, such an attack "could take out a large percentage of mobile communications."

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