Have you ever had sensitive data that you didn't want to get into the wrong hands? Always marveled over those evil villain's bases which self-destruct? Well, RunCore has brought to market an SSD that self-destructs on command to permanently erase your data. You get the speed of an SSD with the cool features of an evil villain's lair.

In the video above, you can see an explanation of how the self-destruct function works along with the actual self-destruction happening. After the button is pressed, a puff of smoke comes out of the SSD due to how the self-destruction works. The NAND chips are over-volted so that they are physically destroyed.

A less subtle method is the physical destruction of your SSD by applying an over-current to the NAND flash memory and thereby physically destroying these. The RunCore InVincible product series is catering to embedded computer systems requiring high-speed serial switched fabric interconnects for rugged design implementation and more flexible power ranges. Delivering optimized storage options particularly in mission-critical fields such aerospace, defense and general industrial applications.

Another research firm has confirmed that Samsung is the top cell phone maker in the world. With 86.6 million handsets sold in the first quarter of 2012, Samsung has reclaimed the title from Apple. That 86.6 million sold is 25.9 percent higher than last year's first quarter and helped give Samsung a 20.7% share of the market.

Of the 86.6 million handsets sold last quarter, 38 million of them were smartphones. Samsung's 38 million smartphones account for more than 40% of Android phones in the world. That number is huge considering not a single other handset maker has captured more than 10% of the Android smartphone market.

Nokia was thrown out of the way as Samsung flew past. Nokia, now in second place, sold 83.2 million handsets, a decrease of 22.7% from last year's quarter. "Smartphone sales are becoming of paramount importance at a worldwide level," Gartner principal research analyst Anshul Gupta said in a statement. "For example, smartphone volumes contributed to approximately 43.9 per cent of overall sales for Samsung as opposed to 16 per cent for Nokia."

Is your current home wireless fast enough? No? Well, maybe you should pick up a new router based off of the technology that some researchers in Japan are working on. They have smashed the current record for transfer speed by double. Last November, chipmaker ROHM transferred data at 1.5Gb/s using a frequency of 300GHz.

The researchers have smashed that, however, by managing an incredible 3Gb/s. Unfortunately, due to the super high frequency, the farthest the data can travel before being affected by interference is about 10m, or 30ft for us Americans. The researchers managed this feat by using 542GHz radio waves which oscillate faster, hence can carry more data.

The technology required to operate in the terahertz region (300GHz-3THz) has always been too bulky and expensive to be of any value. It would have been near impossible to tuck inside a smartphone due to its size and power draw. This new work uses a 1mm^2 resonant tunnelling diode, or RTD, which significantly reduces the size and power requirements.

Chinese search company Baidu has whispered into the ears of TechCrunch that they have some big plans for the Baidu Cloud Smart Terminal system that runs their newly-announced phone. Baidu wants to push Baidu Cloud into all major mobile operating systems, including Windows Phone, iOS and Android.

According to a Baidu spokesperson, the company wants to eventually produce a Windows Phone with Baidu Cloud, as well as an iOS-based device. A Windows Phone I could see happening, but an iOS device? It would really require Apple's complete permission, and I just can't see this happening.

Baidu Cloud is a suite of apps tied into Baidu's storage, music and search offerings. The phone announced today, is a low-cost phone, dubbed Changhong H5018 and sports a 3.5-inch 480x320 touchscreen, 3G connectivity, and a 3-megapixel camera. It will be available for $158, which earns it the right to be dubbed a low-cost smartphone. Baidu Cloud runs on top of Android 2.3, and because Google gives Android partners much more freedom in adapting their OS, it gives Baidu the chance to start off on Android.

AllThingsD is reporting that with sources close to the situation, investors are being told that the IPO price range for Facebook is between $34 and $38 per share. This results in the highest valuation being over $100 billion, fully diluted.

Last month, the predictions per share were at around $31, in filings related to its pending acquisition of photo-sharing start-up, Instagram. Recent ranges have put the social networking site at between $28 and $34.

Other reports have put the price between $35 and $40, so $34-$38 per share doesn't seem out of the question. The higher price is an indication that some of the reports from last week saying there was weak investor interest... but they were obviously wrong. The official pricing for the IPO for Facebook will arrive on Thursday, with a public offering on Friday under the "FB" ticker symbol on the Nasdaq market.

Samsung's GALAXY S III is nearly here, and whilst the phone sports a 4.8-inch HD Super AMOLED screen, and an impressive 2,100 mAh battery, the battery life itself was questioned. But, GSM Arena have stepped in and thrown the quad-core smartphone through some tests, which are very surprising.

They started with 3G talk time, where the GALAXY S III beats out the iPhone 4S by a large margin, and also beats the HTC One V and S by just minutes. The iPhone 4S sports 7 hours and 41 minutes of 3G talk time, where the GALAXY S III smashes it with 10 hours and 20 minutes, impressive, Samsung. Next up we have web browsing.

During this test, the GALAXY S III only provides 5 hours and 17 minutes of web browsing, compared to the iPhone 4S' very impressive 6 hours and 56 minutes. I'm guessing this is down to the GALAXY S III's much larger screen. Video playback is something very important on smartphones these days, especially something with a 4.8-inch screen. How did the GALAXY S III go against the iPhone 4S?

The cloud, isn't it wonderful? NVIDIA have unveiled some of Kepler's cloud-based benefits during the GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California today. NVIDIA has said that Fermi-based game servers, such as those run by Gaikai, only have one GPU per server, or 28 GPUs per rack. One GPU is dedicated to a game stream and consumes 150W of power.

NVIDIA's cloud solution, GeForce Grid, powered by Kepler GPUs allows four GPUs per server, or 84 per rack at 75W each. This results in huge power savings for server operators, and this should also be passed down to consumers, and gamers. NVIDIA has mentioned that it's possible for a streaming service to offer bundles of games for around $10 per month. To compare, OnLive offers roughly 200-plus titles, but not new releases, for $9.99 per month.

GeForce Grid isn't just more economical, it also reduces server-side latency by up to 30ms. With lag being a huge concern with existing server-based gaming services, GeForce Grid could really step up and be something quite amazing. NVIDIA puts this improvement of latency to its fast and concurrent game capture APIs, strategic geographic server placement, and better input lag on Smart TV Ethernet ports.

Square Enix and Crystal Dynamics have announced that their reboot of Tomb Raider has been delayed until 2013. Head of Crystal Dynamics, Darrell Gallagher, said that the studio had two aims when it decided to make a new Lara Croft title, firstly to create a "modern" Tomb Raider, and secondly, to make the "best game of our careers".

It's the second goal that has caused them to delay the reboot, from its original Autumn release date, to sometime in Q1 of 2013. This delay will fly right past the lucrative Christmas shopping season. Gallagher adds:

We're doing things that are completely new to Tomb Raider in this game and the additional development time will allow us to put the finishing touches into the game and polish it to a level that you deserve. believe that this is the right choice and I guarantee it will be worth the wait. The game is looking amazing and we can't wait to show it to everyone at E3 in a few weeks.

GM has announced that they will be pulling $10 million in ads from Facebook as they say they don't work. This comes at a bad time for Facebook as they are about to launch their IPO. GM's marketing executive have apparently been reviewing GM's advertising and found that the paid ads are worth the money. They will, however, continue to use the free advertising on Facebook.

GM currently spends somewhere in the neighborhood of $40million on Facebook advertising, though only $10 million of that goes to paid Facebook ads. (These are presumably annual figures) The other $30 million goes to upkeep on the company's Facebook page, along with paying for promotions and giveaways which don't appear to make Facebook any money.

This $10 million isn't much in terms of the $3.7 billion that Facebook brought in last year in advertising. However, GM is the third largest advertiser in the United States, so the fact of them pulling their advertising may cause other companies to reexamine their strategies to see if Facebook is really worth it.

The photo sharing site Flickr is set to improve a major feature. Flickr is moving to something they are calling a "liquid layout" which will change the layout to match the size of the browser window viewing the site. The layout will focus on showing high-res images as large as it can on the main photo pages along with the usual information around the side.

The image above is what it used to look like. The image below is what the new "liquid layout" will look like for someone with a large monitor. The pictures were originally 500px wide as the site launched when 800x600 was the norm. In 2010, this was increase to 640px. Now they have selected a range of sizes so that images won't have to be upsampled.

This redesign is just one of many that the aging site is in need of. The site promises many more over the coming year. Next is speed: "Now that the algorithm is complete, we need to work on the performance," said Flickr developer Ross Harmes in a Flickr code blog post. "The first time you go to a liquid photo page, we have no choice but to adjust the page width on the fly. But every other photo page you visit will have the dimensions stored from the last page, and the page will be rendered with the correct width from the start."