Nightly Tech Reading - briefly
(hx) 03:29 AM CEST - Aug,13 2004
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- MSBlast suspect pleads guilty -
A 19-year-old Minneapolis man pleaded guilty Wednesday to unleashing part
of the MSBlast worm attack that wreaked havoc on the Internet last summer.
Jeffrey Lee Parson admitted creating the MSBlast.B variant, also called
teekids, by modifying the original version of the worm and adding a backdoor
that granted him control of infected computers, federal prosecutors said.
Sentencing is scheduled for Nov. 12 in Seattle before U.S. District Judge
Marsha Pechman. Parson could face between 18 and 37 months in prison on the
charge of intentionally causing damage to a networked computer, plus possible
restitution in the millions of dollars.
- DVD Jon cracks Airport music streaming - Norwegian programmer
Jon Lech Johansen has decrypted and published the key that Apple's
wireless hi-fi bridge, Airport Express, uses to protect music streams. He's
also released the source code to a small Windows command-line tool he calls
JustePort. In essence his crack opens the door for other applications to
broadcast music to your hi-fi over a home WLAN network using Express, rather
than just iTunes 4.6. For users on Linux machines, or with WMA or OGG format
files, this could be a boon, as iTunes supports neither format out of the box.
- ISS BlackIce Server Protect Unprivileged User Attack - On Aug 11,
2004 further analysis by Thomas Ryan found the vulnerability to affect
blackice.ini, sigs.ini, protect.ini not just firewall.ini as originally
reported. Furthermore research has shown
BlackIce was vulnerable from any IP address listed in blackice.ini, not
just local attacks.
- Win XP SP2 turns Firewire 800 into Firewire 100 - The moderator of
the RME forum has warned that
installing
Windows XP SP2 can lead to the bus speed being limited to 100Mbit/s.
Matthias Carstens posted the message on the RME forum yesterday, but says it's
not a problem particular to RME products. He said: It affects any Firewire 800
device. If you have a FW800 PCI card and an FW 800 hard disk, go see the bits
come one by one through the Firewire cable. Microsoft, said La Cie, has
included updates to FireWire drivers for improved compatability, stability and
data integrity. La Cie's drives that use a Firewire 800 interface are affected
by the update and need a
firmware upgrade. But La Cie's Firewire 400 drives are just fine. If
you need to find out whether you need the firmware upgrade, there's a La Cie
document
here (thanks
TheInquirer)
- Windows XP SP2 Impressions - Many, many users are reporting
problems with
SP2 limiting outbound TCP/IP connections. This appears to be nailing
anyone who makes heavy network use of their machine, including especially
users running P2P applications (thanks
Slashdot.org)
- Windows XP Starter's Edition release set for October -
Microsoft announced
it would offer a low-cost starter edition of its Windows XP operating system
in Asia starting in October, as it strives to hold onto market share facing
erosion from the open-source Linux system and software piracy.
- Windows vs Linux - Will it always be a Microsoft Windows world?
That's what I hoped to find out when I sliced open the box containing the new
PC I'd ordered from WalMart.com. It had a respectable 1.6-gigahertz processor,
a serviceable 40-gigabyte hard drive, a CD-ROM drive, an MP3 player, and
enough other software to keep me occupied for life, though supporting it all
was a barely adequate 128 megabytes of RAM. Okay, I knew this chunky black box
wouldn't be the sexiest PC on my block. But that was fine, considering its
paltry $278 price tag—and that I'd really ordered it for what it didn't have:
any Microsoft software whatsoever.
Rather than Windows and Office, it came with Linspire 4.5, one of the many
commercial versions of the open-source Linux operating system that are now
available, and a link to a website where I could download a variety of
open-source applications.
- America Online Launches Low-Cost PC -
AOL is offering new subscribers a PC for $299.99 - as long as they sign up
for at least a year of AOL dial-up service at 23.90 per month. Broadband
customers can sign up for the $24.95/month AOL BYOA (Bring Your Own Access)
plan, which includes unlimited access to AOL for Broadband features and
unlimited dial-up access. (The high-speed connection must be procured from
another provider.) Built by Systemax, the AOL Optimized PC includes a 2 GHz
Intel Celeron Processor, a 40GB hard drive, 256 MB of RAM and a CD-ROM drive,
a 17 monitor, a printer, speakers, a mouse and a keyboard.
- SiS begins ramping PCIe-enabled chipsets - Silicon Integrated
Systems (SiS) has
begun ramping production of its PCIe-enabled chipsets, including the SiS
656 and SiS 649, supporting Intel Pentium 4 CPUs, and the SiS 756, supporting
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) Athlon 64FX CPUs, according to company sources.
- NVIDIA's GeForce 6600 preview - NVIDIA is stepping things up a
gear, today launching a new set of NV43 products at QuakeCon, the 6600GT and
6600. Hexus.net let us know they have
details on both cards. Another coverage can be found on
TGH,
Neoseeker,
HotHardware
- Kingston KHX3200K2/2G Hyper-X3200 2GB DDR400 review -
The Hyper-X3200 modules run at a latency of CAS 2.5 3-3-6. To manufacture
extremely low latency modules of this size would have been far too costly. A
cost Kingston is unwilling to pass on to the consumer. Hyper-X modules most
definitely represent high performance, regardless of kit size. As you will see
in this review, this particular kit performs as if it were a whole other
memory, which was the inspiration for my title.
- NForce 3 Motherboard Roundup -
We have the
Chaintech with the staggering array of included extras, but lacking in any
NForce 3 features such as onchip LAN and NV RAID. Gigabyte brings us the first
ever incarnation of 1394b, 800Mbit Firewire with dual LAN and NV RAID
included. MSI stay true to the chipset and leave out the box fillings,
offering us the full NForce 3 suite of NV RAID and NV LAN / firewall.
-
eVGA GeForce 6800 Ultra Extreme Edition -
It's one of the fastest overall video cards currently available for 3D
gaming, and no other card is better equipped to handle Doom 3 at the moment -
bar none. Image quality was excellent throughout all of our testing (both
during benchmarks and while gaming), it's one of the few cards with dual-DVI
outputs, and it ships with a complete version of an excellent game, namely
FarCry. About the only drawbacks to the eVGA GeForce 6800 Ultra Extreme
Edition are price and availability.
-
Enermax UC-9FATR2 Review -
The
UC-9FATR2 fits in a standard 5.25 inch bay and offers a wide variety of
features. One feature that you will not find on many, if any, other similar
devices is serial ATA connectors, and this unit has two
-
Silverstone SST-FP54B LCD Display review - SilverStone
brings us today
the
SST-FP54 VFD (Vacuum Fluorescent Display). It's an attractive device that
fits in any available 5.25 bay, and displays 32 characters of text (2 lines,
16 characters each). That may not sound like a lot, but you'd be surprised
what you can fit into that small amount of space-- Winamp info, network stats,
and system info like memory/CPU utilization, just to name a few.
- RCA HDLP50W151 review - To sum it up,
the RCA Scenium HDLP50W151 is an excellent display device that is very
attractive and reasonably priced for an integrated HDTV set. At a suggested
retail price of $3,999 (probably less than $3,500 street), it offers new DLP
display technology featuring integrated HDTV tuning. It’s also housed in an
attractive cabinet that can easily fit sit onto a base with storage, or can be
placed into a wall unit. It has all of the right connections presently needed
for any upscale Home Theater and then some. Since it includes 2-way 1394, the
set can easily be tethered to an HD-level DVHS VCR or HD PVR (such as RCA’s
new DVR10) for the recording of pristine HD images. The HDLP50W151 (or its
identical, but larger 61-in. sibling – HDLP61W151) is strongly recommended for
repeated viewings.
- HP dx6050 review - Even as a very basic machine,
the dx6050 comes with a pretty good set of features, especially
considering the target market. Although AMD has not traditionally been a
choice for business PCs the dx6050 shows that there is no reason why you
wouldn’t go for an AMD processor instead of one from Intel. What really
impressed me were the benchmark scores, where the dx6050 managed to keep up
very well with the Acer Veriton VT7600GT and in fact even outperformed it in
both SYSmark 2004 and PCMark 2004.
- Motorola V600 cell-phone review - Although Bluetooth gets rejected
on every corner of every street,
the Motorola V600
does have it. And I must say it's a very loveable feature.
Sending/Receiving ringtones/pictures in a pub can always be fun for 9.5
seconds. When you have a laptop with Bleutooth or one of those Bleutooth
stickies you can place your pictures you've taken with your camera anywhere
you want. So no wires required. Texting, if that's your thing, is quite fun
with this phone. You have up to 8 lines of text, so that means you can get
more than 150 chars on one screen.
- The Antivirus Defense-in-Depth Guide -
The Antivirus Defense-in-Depth Guide provides an easy to understand
overview of the assorted types of malware, their risks, characteristics, means
of replication and payloads. The solution also details the considerations for
implementing a comprehensive antivirus defense for your network, servers and
clients which goes beyond simply installing antivirus software into the
related tools which will help reduce your risk of infection.
- Boot.ini options reference -
There are number of BOOT.INI switches that are useful for driver
developers that wish to test their drivers under a variety of different system
configurations without having to have a separate machine for every one.
- SQL Server Health and History Tool (SQLH2) -
The Microsoft SQL Server Health and History Tool (SQLH2) allows you to
collect information from instances of SQL Server, store this information, and
run reports against the data in order to determine how SQL Server is being
used.
- Toolkit to Temporarily Block Delivery of Windows XP SP2 to a PC Through
Automatic Updates and Windows - Please note that
the mechanism to temporarily disable delivery of Windows XP SP2 will be
available for a period of 120 days (4 months) from August 16. At the end of
this period, Windows XP SP2 will be delivered to all Windows XP and Windows XP
Service Pack 1 systems
- dd_rescue recovery tool 0.1 (Linux) -
dd_rescue
(download)
copies data from one file or block device (hard disk, cdrom, etc) to another,
trying hard to rescue data in case of read errors. It does not truncate the
output file if not asked to. So every time you run it on the same output file,
it tries to fill in the gaps. The algorithmn will: read the non-damaged part
of the disk, skipping the damaged areas; try to read the damaged areas,
splitting them into smaller pieces and reading the non- damaged pieces, until
the hardware block size is reached; try to read the damaged hardware blocks
until the specified number of retries is reached, or until interrupted by the
user.
-
Microsoft IntelliPoint 5.2 -
IntelliPoint software gives your Microsoft mouse full functionality and
lets you customize the mouse to fit your needs.
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Updated:11:06 PM CEST Jun,04
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