Designed to boost business productivity with advanced performance and multi-level security, the new Acer TravelMate P453 is the answer to the needs of SMB/SOHO looking for the perfect balance between security, productivity and ergonomics. All details have been fine-tuned by Acer to offer the optimal user experience whether in the office or on the go.

Acer takes the protections of users' data and valuable assets very seriously. To secure the IT investment, protect data and reduce TCO thorough remote management features, the TravelMate P453 comes with Acer ProShield Security, a suite of security and manageability tools integrated in a unified user interface. Acer ProShield secures the notebook from unwanted access with multi-level security features including BIOS/HDD password protection and Trusted Platform Module (TPM) solution.

Acer America today announced its entry into the thin client market with a new commercial offering, the Acer Veriton N Series. The new thin and rich clients provide simplified manageability and energy-efficiency in a secure, space-saving form factor for virtual environments. These practical systems are designed for small and medium businesses, call centres and customers in education, financial services, healthcare and government wanting to tightly manage data, while reducing overall costs.

By increasing hardware utilization and consolidation, the Acer Veriton N Series provides superb performance while keeping operational costs and power consumption low. Centralized processing makes it easy to manage data and hardware assets, monitor system access and enforce security policies and procedures, significantly increasing internal data security.
"Our new thin client line will help organizations meet today's reality of ever shrinking budgets by simplifying IT without compromising on business deliverables," said Michael O'Beirne, Acer senior director, commercial product marketing. "The Acer N Series are easy to configure, maintain and manage, while reducing the overall cost of ownership."

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST), a leading supplier of enterprise-class solid state and hard disk drives, today announced that EMC Corporation (NYSE:EMC) has qualified and is now shipping Hitachi Ultrastar SSD400S SLC-based (single level cell), 2.5-inch, SAS solid state drives (SSD) in its "all Flash" VNX Unified Storage systems for mission-critical Microsoft and Oracle environments. The Ultrastar SSD400S family is the world's first jointly develop SAS and FC enterprise-class SSDs, combining Hitachi GST's proven enterprise HDD strength with Intel's extensive capabilities developing high-endurance SLC NAND flash memory and advanced SSD technology. All of this powers Hitachi GST's leading line SSDs with high endurance, reliability and sustained performance for Tier 0, mission-critical server and storage workloads.

We have brought you the potential perils of the upcoming UEFI Forum-implemented - www.uefi.org - Windows 8 secure boot feature here, here and here. However, it appears that it may not be so 'secure' after all, since there appears to be a surefire way to circumvent it, at least for the moment, while it's in development.

Softpedia has scored an exclusive interview with security researcher Peter Kleissner, who has created various Windows (XP, Server 2003 etc) "bootkits", which allow OS infection at the highest privilege level, giving unrestricted access to the whole of the PC. His latest one, called Stoned Lite, shows how the Windows 8 secure boot process, still in development, can be subverted, as it stands. He is planning to release details of how the code works at the upcoming International Malware Conference (MalCon) - malcon.org - that will take place in India on November 25th. It appears that the real vulnerability exists in the legacy BIOS boot procedure, not in Microsoft's implementation of secure boot, as Kleissner said:

The problem with the legacy startup is that no one verifies the MBR, which makes it the vulnerable point. With UEFI and secure boot, all the boot applications and drivers have to be signed (otherwise they won't be loaded). You can compare it to TPM, although Arie van der Hoeven from Microsoft announced that the secure boot feature is mandatory for OEMs who want to be UEFI certified. It is a good message that security is not an option.