Notebook shipments overtake desktops

Notebook shipments overtake desktops

NEW YORK — Shipments of notebook computers edged past desktop sales in the third quarter for the first time, according to data from the research firm iSupply.

Preliminary figures for the quarter show notebook PC shipments shot up about 40 percent from the same period a year ago to 38.6 million, according to iSupply. Meanwhile desktop shipments fell about 1.3 percent to 38.5 million.

The numbers underscore a broader shift toward portable computing as more functions such as e-mail and Web surfing migrate to mobile phones and the popularity of inexpensive “netbooks” used mainly for Internet access grows.

“The trend has accelerated and will continue going forward,” AmTech Research analyst Dinesh Moorjani said.

He expects computer makers to ratchet down production of desktops by 20 percent in the fourth quarter while notebook production should remain flat.

Hackers to partner with transit agency

SAN FRANCISCO — A trio of Massachusetts Institute of Technology students who found a way to hack into the Boston subway system’s payment cards have agreed to partner with transit officials there to make the system more secure.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation announced the agreement Monday, two months after the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority dropped a lawsuit against the students, who were represented for free by the EFF, a civil-liberties group that frequently takes up cases involving security researchers and computer hackers.

The transit agency had sued to stop the students from presenting findings at a computer-security conference.

The students — Zack Anderson, R.J. Ryan and Alessandro Chiesa — have argued all along they were trying to help the MBTA by giving it advance notice of their planned talk last summer and keeping specific details of their hack secret.

But the MBTA worried of widespread fare fraud if students discussed how they were able to add hundreds of dollars in value to MBTA’s two primary payment cards — CharlieCard and CharlieTicket.

Before they could take the stage at the DefCon hacker conference in Las Vegas in August, the students were slapped with a lawsuit and a restraining order preventing them from giving the talk. Everyone found out what they were going to say anyway: All 87 slides of the students’ presentation were already online, having been given out to conference attendees on CDs before the lawsuit was filed.

The MBTA argued it needed time to fix the problems, but the issue touched off a legal battle about whether the students’ free-speech rights were violated and prompted the EFF to take up the students’ case.

The judge eventually lifted the gag order, and the transit agency dropped its lawsuit in October. The two sides have been working since then on how they would collaborate to make the fare system more secure and have the students’ work taken seriously, said Jennifer Granick, the EFF’s civil liberties director.

Dutch company punches holes in font to save ink

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands — A Dutch company looking for ways to reduce the environmental costs of printing has developed a new font that it says cuts ink usage by about 15 percent.

In essence, the “Ecofont” has little holes in the letters.

Spranq, the Utrecht-based marketing and communications company that designed the font, struck on a Swiss-cheese design after failures with earlier experiments using thin letters and partial letters — like the stripes of a zebra.

“It turns out that it’s necessary to preserve the size and outline of letters to keep them readable,” company co-founder Gerjon Zomer says.

He concedes the font isn’t beautiful but says it could be adequate for personal use or for internal use at a company.

Spranq offers the font free on its Web site. Zomer says his site saw a spike in traffic last week as word of the Ecofont began to spread. Much of the international traffic came from the United States.

He says that was kind of gratifying because “when you put something online you never know what to expect.”

Associated Press