SECURITY...

• New WINS Exploits Making Rounds  - Almost a month after Microsoft released a fix for a security issue in the WINS name server, malicious exploits continue to haunt tardy network administrators. According to an alert from the SANS ISC (Internet Storm Center), there has been a startling increase in hacker probes directed at TCP port 42 and UDP 42, which handle WINS services. "If you have not patched your WINS servers in respective companies or campuses, beware. Patching these systems is now overdue," the center warned.
• Microsoft Readies "A1" Security Subscription Service - Microsoft's anti-virus/anti-spyware strategy is taking shape. Sources say Redmond's prepping a fee-based bundle, which could go beta soon. Microsoft is currently expecting to field its A1 anti-spyware/anti-virus bundle in the form of a renewable subscription service, the same way a number of other security vendors do, sources said. The service will allow users to keep current on the code needed to combat ever-changing viruses, worms, spybots and the like. Some elements of A1 are likely to be built directly into future versions of Windows, according to partners. Specifically, some of the security-management functionality, such as the security-health-validation technology which Microsoft officials discussed last year, would likely be bundled into Windows itself, partners said.
• AOL's Online Password Reset feature does not fully validate - This report is in reference to the Online Password Reset that exists for the AOL client for paying user accounts and not AOL Instant Messenger.
• Mozilla Firefox Download Dialog Source Spoofing - Secunia Research has discovered a vulnerability in Mozilla / Mozilla Firefox, which can be exploited to spoof the source displayed in the Download Dialog box. The problem is that long sub-domains and paths aren't displayed correctly, which therefore can be exploited to obfuscate what is being displayed in the source field of the Download Dialog box.

OFF-TOPIC...

• Digital Watches May Pose Airline Threat - The Federal Bureau of Investigation and Department of Homeland Security are warning transportation officials to look for al-Qaeda terrorists wearing two types of digital watches. Altimeters, which measure altitude, but could be used to trigger an explosive when a jetliner reaches a certain height and watches containing hidden cigarette lighters, which could be used to ignite a bomb, like the one show bomber Richard Reid hid in his sneakers on a flight from Paris to Miami. Both types of watches are readily available on the Internet.
• TV Cream's Top 100 Toys - TV Cream's Top 100 Toys shows the list of favorite toys based on the Web site readers.
• Japanese Console Sales for 2004 - Nintendo DS: 1,286,074 / Sony PSP: 352,295 / Sony PS2: 2,799,009 / GameCube: 880,836 / Xbox: 36,976 / GBA SP: 2,532,107.

TECHNOLOGY...

• Internet2 in Russia - Already Reality? - Corbina Telecom, Russian all-around telecoms operator, has started the Internet2 project in Moscow, which will connect the clients of Corbina Telecom - both present and future - into a high speed data network possessing much wider features in comparison with the networks of the previous generation. On December 15, 2004 the company arranged a press conference, where several features of this data network were demonstrated.
• Microsoft Windows Mobile 2005 Revealed - Magneto - Currently in beta testing, Magneto is the code-name for what is expected to be finally named as Windows Mobile 2005. Microsoft is progressing well with Magneto and is currently running a Beta 2 (v5.0.1512 Build 14207) dogfood test internally. The first release candidate of Magneto is expected on the 16th February with an RTM following on the 13th April. Currently Microsoft are only testing Magneto on the Motorola MPx220 Smartphone. This indicates that the device will be able to be upgraded sometime this year. It's unclear what others devices will be supported for upgrade.
• Canon to Start Making Rear Projection TVs in 2005 - Japanese camera and office equipment maker Canon said on Tuesday it would start producing rear projection televisions later this year, aiming to secure a chunk of the rapidly growing market for big screen TVs.
• Samsung develops 21-inch OLED for TVs - The chipmaking division of the South Korean company on Tuesday announced a 21-inch display for TVs based on organic light-emitting diode technology. OLED is viewed as a potential successor to liquid crystal displays, used in many flat-panel TVs and computer monitors.
• InPhase shows off holographic disc drive - The prototype has been reviewed and photographed at the Pabster and can handle capacities of up to 1.6 TB. The company is planning a range of holographic drives, with data capacities that range from 200GB to 1.6TB. It works with Blu-ray 407 nm blue lasers to provide high capacity holographic storage.

• Hitachi plans big boost for small drives - Hitachi is planning to at least double the capacity of its 1-inch Microdrive hard drives within a year, the company said, ahead of the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. At present Hitachi's most capacious Microdrive can hold 4GB of data, but the new drives, due in the second half of this year, will be able to hold between 8GB and 10GB, said Bill Healy, senior vice president of product strategy and marketing at Hitachi.

• AMD confirms raid on illegal CPU labeling in Taiwan - Taiwanese law enforcement officials raided several businesses that were allegedly "remarking" AMD processors, an AMD official confirmed Tuesday (Jan. 4).  Remarking is the process of fraudulently remarking processor chip packaging with the part number of an enhanced specification device. AMD spokeswoman Cathy Abbinati said the legal investigation is still ongoing and that AMD is not releasing details of the raid.

HARDWARE...

• The best of 2004 hardware & tech - @ TechReport, @ GamersDepot
• Intel Preps Onslaught with New Pentium 4 Processors 600 - Intel Pentium 4 processors series 600 are expected to be positioned for high-end and performance-mainstream market segments in Q1 2005. The new microprocessors will be based on the Prescott 2M core that brings 2MB L2 cache, Intel EM64T, Enhanced Intel SpeedStep Technology (EIST) as well as Execute Disable Bit (EDB) capability. The chips will be clocked at 3.20GHz, 3.40GHz, 3.60GHz and 3.80GHz and will be intended for infrastructure supporting 800MHz Quad Pumped Bus and TDP of up to 115W.
• Intel Smithfield chipsets said to support SATA 2 - Intel's next-generation Pentium 4 desktop chipsets, "Glenwood" and "Lakeport", will support Serial ATA 2, 667MHz DDR 2 and a 1066MHz frontside bus clock frequency, according to Taiwanese motherboard-maker sources of DigiTimes. Glenwood and Lakeport are the successors to today's 925- and 915-series chipsets, and are believed to carry the official designations 955 and 945, respectively. Both are likely to be pitched at Intel's first dual-core desktop P4, Smithfield, which is due to ship mid-2005.
• Linksys Secures Media Streaming - The Linksys Wireless-G Media Link, to be announced this week at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, is one of a growing number of devices for sending music, video, and photos from a PC to consumer electronics devices around a home. The new Linksys device will include DTCP-IP (Digital Transmission Content Protection over Internet Protocol), which is designed to allow users to share content among many users in a home while protecting it from neighbors within range of a home wireless LAN, says Rob Crooke, vice president and marketing director of Intel's Desktop Platforms Group.
• Plextor introduces low-cost high performance CD-R/RW drive -  Plextor has announced yet another CD-R/RW drive - the PX-230A. This drive offers the features of its previous CD-Recorders but at a lower Manufacturer's Suggested Retail Price (MSRP) of $65. The drives main features include improved CD-RW recording speed of 32X (up from 24X in its previous model) as well as the usual 52x CD-R recording, 52x reading and error-free digital audio extraction .
• Gigabyte does dual PCI-E graphics for LGA775 - Gigabyte has announced an LGA775 motherboard that supports dual PCI Express graphics cards. The GA-8I915P Dual Graphic appears to be based on Intel's 915 chipset, making it unlikely that the board serves a full 16 PCI-E lanes to each of its x16 slots
• NV40/45 WDM video acceleration still broken - Nvidia recently released its Pure Video marchitecture driver together with its Turbo cache marchitecture. It will work on Geforce 6600 and its variations and partially on 6800 cards. Geforce 6600 can do hardware WDM encoding and DVD encoding and with new driver it dramatically lowers the CPU consumption. However Geforce 6800 cards - both NV40 based AGP cards or NV45 based bridged PCIe cards won't show any difference while decoding–playing WDM files for you.
• Nanometer Wars: Athlon 64 versus...Athlon 64  - With the 3500+, AMD has managed to reduce overall thermal output by a noticeable margin. Winchester's voltage requirements have been reduced slightly, to 1.4v from 1.5v for the 130nm part. The rated nominal thermal output is 67W, versus 89W for 130nm. But does this reduction translate into real world advantage? ExtremeTech dug out their Fluke digital voltmeter and a thermocouple and decided to find out.
• AMD64 PCI Express Chipsets – nVidia nForce 4 vs. ATI 200 Series - The ATI 200 Series is a good chipset, not great but good nonetheless. On the other hand the nVidia nForce 4 is a great chipset. Both of the reference motherboards we received from both companies performed extremely close to each other so you couldn't decide which board is better or worse by just looking at the performance numbers alone. While the ATI chipset is shown terrible numbers in USB/Firewire transfer rates, this isn't a big deal as it is a well known issue and the latest revision of the chipset will have this problem fixed, according to ATI.
• 1GB PQI Turbo PC3200 DPU DC kit - The PQI Turbos will run for a little less than 250 dollars, about 30 dollars less than the average price for TCCD modules. While the price was right for these modules, they did not overclock as well as some of the other TCCD sticks I have tested. For a pair of sticks that are only rated to run at DD400, these modules are amazing for their price and performance.
• Corsair Rev2 PC3200XL 2-2-2 Memory (TWINX1024-3200XL) - At the heart of the new revision of the 3200XL modules are the same Samsung TCCD chips that were used in the original 3200XL sticks (and now in many competing products). The main difference between the old and new XL's is the PCB (printed circuit board). Corsair made some design enhancements to the PCB in order to support higher top-end clock speeds. That adds up to the new 3200XL overclocking to high speeds with more success than the old one.
• Radeon x700 Pro 256 MB VIVO (HiS) - Directly compared to the the 6600 GT both cards have some advantages and disadvantages. But make no mistake, considering it's equal price the GeForce 6600 GT does have the overall lead in performance and it has a newer feature set (Shader Model 3). When you are in doubt what to buy, well look at the results as they speak for themselves. But although the GeForce 6600 GT has an edge over the x700 Pro, thanks to HiS this product is very close to that competition.
• Abit RX300 SE-Guru Review at Trusted - The card running in Turbo mode which clocks it up from a default speed of 325MHz core and 200MHz DDR for the memory (effectively 400MHz) to a fairly impressive overclock of 405MHz core and 256MHz memory (effectively 512MHz). The memory can however be pushed further, but with 4ns memory you're still limited with regards to how far it will overclock.
• Gigabyte GV-3D1 (Dual core GPU) - The Gigabyte GV-3D1 has 256MB GDDR3 memory and a 256-bit memory bus with two GPUs on one card. There are new benchmark results available for FutureMark Bundle, Far Cry, Painkiller, Half-Life 2, Need for Speed Underground 2, Colin McRae Rally 2005, Doom 3, Call of Duty and Return to Castle Wolfenstein. Another r eview can be found here.
• GeForce 6600 GT AGP roundup - Right now AGP-based GeForce 6600 GT cards are selling for a little more than their $200 list price, but once more board partners bring their cards to market and supply catches up to demand, prices will quickly fall to the sub-$200 price point PCI Express-based GeForce 6600 GT cards are currently going for. 
• Asour VPC-1000B Multimedia DVD Optical Drive - Even though the price for this VPC-1000B is around 5 times than a normal optical drive; USD$149.99 but it is still cheaper than a home audio and it can work without a PC where user can install it inside a room, anywhere or even in the toilet to enjoy the CD/MP3 and it saves the electric power too; 18W when it is played isolated. Besides that, it is also a FM radio receiver, SRS WOW audio processor is great even though for normal speaker only, and it is free of any software installation. This is a great product especially for PC enthusiasts.
  Seagate Momentus 100gb 5400.2 - Yes you read correctly 100 gigs of laptop storage. Seagate has continued it's tradition of high speed with a low power consumption, but will this massive storehouse live up to the expectation? I'm betting it will since it's little brother, the 40gb racked up the awards last year. The 2.5" Momentus is a 100gb hard drive running at 5400 RPM with a sweet 8mb cache, which you normally only see on desktop hard drives.
• Toshiba 80GB 16MB Cache 2.5in HDD - The drive features a Fluid Dynamic Bearing motor for quieter operation and spins at 5400 RPM. It's rated for ATA-100 speeds and has a 12ms average seek time. While this may seem slow by desktop standards, keep in mind that more compact lower density notebook drives have a lot of catching up to do.
• JAHT JN-1110R32C Gigabit Ethernet Adapter - The JN-1110R32C is a 10/100/1000Mbps 32bit Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) Local Bus Ethernet adapter designed to address high-performance system application requirements. The Bus-Master architecture provides very high data throughput as it runs in the 32-bit PCI bus of the serve's mainboard rather than waiting on the CPU.
• Extreme Wireless Networking from Gigabyte - Turbo G emerges - The 108mbps implementation really is a fine touch. The need for wires now is simply not an issue with the Gigabyte Super-G, unless you want to go Gigabit which should be the only time you would want to have any network cables for this setup. Overall Gigabyte has put a lot of work into getting this unit up and running 100% trouble free with a great easy to use interface and setup.
• Intel P4 Socket 775 Heatsink Roundup - Looking to cool that small nuclear reactor Intel has sold you in the Prescott P4. MadShrimps just informed us they have tested 6 samples of aftermarket LGA775 coolers that might just let you squeak a little more MHz out of your CPU, or at the very least allow the CPU to run just a bit cooler.
• QTechnology 460w Gold Series PSU - PowerSupplyUnits take a look at the QTechnology QT-03460G power supply. This is their 460w Gold Series PSU.
• MGE XG Vigor 500 Watt Power Supply - After running our tests for 38 minutes the results came out better than expected. Looking at the Core voltage you can see it was rock steady at 1.54 volts all the way through the tests, this is something that should make any overclocker pay a bit more attention. Moving to the 3.3 volt line we see that it averaged an outstanding .04 volts during our tests which makes it falls easily within a 3% tolerance.
• Cooler Master Cavalier 2 Desktop Case - The Cavalier desktop series comes in four different models. The retro-look Cavalier 2 includes a large analog sound level meter on the front and comes in either silver or black. For users who desire cleaner lines, the Cavalier 4 is available without the analog meter. All of the Cavalier series of desktop enclosures come with a 300 watt power supply and can accommodate a full size ATX motherboard.
• SAITEK Cyborg EVO - The Saitek Wireless Evo Joystick is a great joystick for flight or space sim gamers. The joystick is good for left and right handed users. The value for dollar this joystick is economical for and gamer. The adjustable palm rest is a great feature so that my thumb can use the buttons along the top of the joystick

GUIDES...

• Basic System Buyer's Guide - January 2005 - They're still pricing out components exclusively from NewEgg to avoid extra shipping fees and headaches when purchasing from several vendors. The budget remains the same: $400 or lower with at least some of the shipping included. Just like last month this is only the box and does not include keyboard, mouse, speakers, monitor, or any other peripherals.
• Extreme Overclocking w/ ASUS A8N SLI - Extreme overclocking 2 6800 ultras in SLI mode is quite challenging due to spacial and powering constraints. But I decided to take on the challenge in order to hit the big numbers.
• X800 Pro VIVO to XT PE Bios Mod - Describes how to mod the X800 Pro VIVO to an XT PE only by flashing the Bios.
• Optimize XP - A Windows XP Optimization Guide v1.8.3 - This guide will help you improve your overall system performance. I avoid using or recommending "all-in-one" Windows XP Tweak programs since many blindly adjust settings that have no affect on performance and can cause future problems. This guide is designed to be performed top to bottom, in sequence since some steps are required to be performed before others. Before using this guide make sure your system meets the Windows XP System Requirements.
• Secure XP - A Windows XP Security Guide - Improve Windows XP's Security on computers not connected to a Domain. Windows XP Home does not include all the security features Windows XP Professional does, so some security options may be unavailable to the Home user. Security on Windows XP starts with having the latest updates. Installing SP2 is essential in making sure your system is secure. SP2 requires a Spyware and Virus free system to install without problems. Please read the advisory and run through Steps 1 and 2 completely before installing SP2.

SOFTWARE...

• Avalon 3D - Demo Video Availiable - There's a demo of Avalon 3D (direct link ~ 70MB) Really cool stuff. Originally designed to only run on the next version of Windows, code-named Longhorn, Avalon is now supported on Windows XP and Windows Server 2003
• inBookmarks 1.45 - inBookmarks (download) is a powerful bookmark solution. It allows you to store, organize, comment and check you Internet pages. It has many powerful facilities that replace and compliment the browser's bookmark management systems. You can easy add URLs from all opened browser sessions.
• Easy PDF to Text Converter  - Easy PDF to Text Converter (download) can extract text from pdf files -- it does NOT need Adobe Acrobat software.
• Unknown Devices utility - By checking Device Manager for unknown devices and extracting information from it, this program attempts to figure out what the device is. You might not have to open your case or look up random numbers off of PCI cards to figure out what they are. Program supports Win95, 98, 98se, Me, 2k, XP and 2003 but not NT. It also attempts to support future OSes. It runs fine from a CD or floppy. Another useful utilities can be found here
• Vstudios Xtreme G 71.24a - This is the Valance Studios Xtreme G driver which includes many performance and Image Quality tweaks. These are modified NVIDIA FOrceWare drivers. Modified drivers simply means that the author takes official or beta drivers from the manufacturer and starts to tweak them for either better image quality and or performance.