SECURITY...

• Microsoft To Force SP2 Update On All XP And XP SP1 Machines - April 12th is the very last day - the day that your Windows XP or Windows XP SP1 computer will be automatically updated to XP SP2 (Service Pack 2) whether you want it to or not. Period.
• Agressive New Sober worm moving fast - A new version of the Sober worm wriggled out of its hole early today and set about quickly attacking computers in Europe and the U.S., a security services company said. The worm is a mass-mailer, meaning it spreads itself via e-mail using contacts listed in the address books of computers it infects.
• Security breakthrough kills "evil twins" - Unveiled at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the 'delayed password disclosure protocol' was created by Markus Jakobsson and Steve Myers of Indiana University. The pair said that the system may have applications in any environment where "mutual identity authentication" is required. The protocol is designed to prevent consumers from getting tricked into connecting to a fake wireless hub, a so-called evil twin, located by hackers in public spaces alongside legitimate access points.
• IE 7: No Phishing Allowed - The full version of IE 7.0 will be included in "Longhorn," which is due next year. Gates said the new version will include significant security upgrades, namely technologies to help prevent URL spoofing in phishing attacks.
• Paris Hilton's cell phone hacked? - Paris Hilton seems to be having more trouble keeping her personal life personal, and this time the socialite apparently exposed several A-list celebrities after the contents of her cell phone were published on the Internet. The content included the phone numbers of the hotel heiress' friends. A representative for T-Mobile confirmed Monday that information from Hilton's T-Mobile Sidekick has been posted online.

OFF-TOPIC...

• Mars Express finds evidence of frozen sea - Images captured by Europe's Mars Express spacecraft have revealed what could be a frozen sea, surviving as blocks of pack ice, just below the surface of the Red Planet, according to an international team of scientists. The apparent underground sea is located just five degrees north of the Martian equator, and as such, it would represent the first large body of water to be found beyond the planet's polar ice caps.
• Good vibrations rule the termite's world - Termites use the vibrations produced when they chew into wood to decide which bits to eat, researchers have discovered. They also seem to use the acoustic vibration signals to detect the presence of other species of termite on the same piece of wood, and to help control the development of immature workers into sexually-active breeders.
• 10 Things Your Lawyer Won't Tell You - Expecting a bundle from a big lawsuit? Don't start spending it yet. You may be shocked to learn how little you'll get to keep. Lawyers may not like to mention it, but federal taxes  - at a rate of 25 to 35% - can easily wipe out most of the money you win in civil lawsuits; bodily injury suits are the only exemption. You'll probably even have to pay federal taxes on the part that's earmarked for your attorney, unless you live in the one of the few regions, including Alabama, Michigan and Texas, where federal appeals courts have sided with taxpayers.
• Crazy Woman Starts Fight in Pizza Parlour Boyfriend Enters And Beats The Crap Out of Patrons - check it out!

TECHNOLOGY...

• Opera Calls for Consortium on IDN Fix - Opera Software has called on its fellow browser makers and the Internet community as a whole to band together in an effort to fix the security issues related to Internationalized Domain Names. The problem with IDN stems from its use of the Unicode character set to enable domain names that include international letters. But because the DNS system that facilitates the Internet only understands ASCII, or U.S. English characters, Unicode URLs must be converted by a Web browser into a format called "Punycode." 
• 90 million Chinese now use Internet - The population of Internet users has kept rising. By June 30, 2004, there were 87 million Internet users in China. The number topped 90 million by the yearend. The Internet sector is also regarded as the industry in China that merges into the international market most closely. It has changed the life of many Chinese people.
• Did the Army get out-gamed? - In a unique deal with Hollywood, the Army spent more than $5-million in taxpayer money to create Full Spectrum Warrior, a video game that was supposed to teach soldiers about urban combat. The Army got what some say is a mediocre training tool, but the companies that designed the game got a sweet deal. Pandemic Studios and its partner THQ have sold nearly 1-million copies for PCs and the Xbox game system; a PlayStation 2 edition will be released next month.
• More Megapixels Hit Your Pocket - A dizzying array of camera models are on display at the PMA 2005 show here. But standing out from the mix of the powerful--such as Canon's EOS Digital Rebel XT consumer SLR--and the penny-pinching--Concord's $80 3-megapixel starter 3047--are compact, point-and-shoot digicams cameras that pack at least 7 megapixels of image resolution.

HARDWARE... 

• Intel unveils new class of Pentium 4s - Intel introduced a line of Pentium 4 desktop chips Sunday that contain 2MB of secondary cache, twice as much as current Pentium 4s, as well as technology from its notebook line that's designed to cut power consumption. Larger caches, a pool of memory located on the processor, generally improve performance. The four chips included in the new 600 series of Pentium 4s range in speeds from 3GHz to 3.6GHz, and all of them feature an 800MHz bus. The top-of-the-line 660 Pentium 4 sells for $605 in quantities of 1,000, while the 630 sells for $224.
• Intel releases information on their new 64-Bit Processors - The company said that these new processors when coupled with the Intel 925/915 Express chipset family would improve performance and response times of applications comprehensively. The five processors are: Intel Pentium 4 Processor Extreme Edition 3.73 GHz and four others in the Intel Pentium 4 Processor 6xx sequence. All of these processors support Hyper-Threading (HT) technology and comes with support for 64-bit memory addressability through Intel Extended Memory 64 Technology (Intel EM64T).
• AMD readies faster Opterons - AMD has announced faster versions of its Opteron 64bit processors, and detailed plans for dual-core and multi-core Opterons. The AMD Opteron Models 152, 252 and 852 have a clock speed of 2.6GHz. The 252 and 852 chips are due to ship this month. The 152 will be available from April.
• AMD Sempron 3000+ to have 128KB cache - AMD recently announced the Sempron 3000+, a socket 754 CPU featuring 128KB cache, The Sempron 2600+ also features 128KB cache, while the 2800+ actually managed to climb to 256KB of memory.  The 3000+ rocks at 1800MHz and has thermal dissipation of an acceptable 62W. The Sempron 2800+ with 256KB cache, has max power of 62W and works at 1600MHz. The slowest of the socket 754s, the 2600+, also works at 1600MHz but in this case has only 128Kb of cache. And 128KB of cache makes it a 2600+. Its maximal thermal power also stops at 62W.
• Shuttle launches first Nvidia nForce4 SFF PC - The XPC SN25P features a Socket 939 motherboard supporting AMD Athlon 64 CPUs, a 1GHz HyperTransport system bus, one PCIe x16 slot and one PCIe x1 slot, as well as support and physical space for three hard drives (two IDE and one SATA drive). Built using an Nvidia nForce MCP (media and communication processor), the system also supports an integrated hardware firewall, SATA I and integrated RAID. In addition, the SN25P is housed in Shuttle’s P chassis, which features a 350W power supply yet still only produces noise at about 31dB when the system is at rest, the company stated.
• Plextor introduces PX-716AL - The Plextor PX-716AL is a highly versatile 10-in-1 slot-loaded DVD/CD burner that supports 6x DVD+R DL Double Layer, 6x DVD-R Dual Layer, 16x DVD+R, 16x DVD-R, and 48x CD-R Writing; 8x DVD+RW, 4x DVD-RW, and 24x CD-RW Rewriting; and 16x max DVD-Reading and 48x max CD-Reading.
• Less is More? Part One - NVIDIA's TurboCache -  EliteBastards take their first in a two-part look at ATI and NVIDIAs new low-end video card technologies. Part one today takes a theoretical look at NVIDIA's TurboCache technology - Part two will cover ATI's HyperMemory upon its official launch.
• Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory - A Shader Model 2.0-free zone - It seems that such marketing-related deals may be taking a more sinister turn. I give you Exhibit A: The leaked demo (thanks Olcay Sonkurt) of the next Splinter Cell title, Chaos Theory. Take a look at the graphical options for this leak and you'll find two options with regard to Shader Model - 1.1 and 3.0. Yep, that's right - Shader Model 2.0 is conspicuous by its absence.
• Intel Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.73GHz - Reviews can be found on AnandTech | Beyond3d | Hexus.net | GamersDepot | MBReview | Hardcoreware | HotHardware | LegitReviews | PC Perspective | TweakTown | X-bit Labs
• Corsair XMS2 DDR2 TWIN2X1024-4300C3PRO - Corsair has tightened the reigns on DDR2 latencies reducing seek times below that of many high-speed DDR kits. Able to run at CL3-3-3-6, Corsair's 4300C3PRO has brought hope to those who believed the only way to extract performance from DDR2 was to run the memory at super high clock speeds and hope for bandwidth. Does Corsair's 4300C3PRO perform and overclock without the need for insanely high latencies?
• Ultra Products PC3200 XL 2-2-2 DDR Memory - Ultra can proudly boast that its new PC3200 XL RAM can hang with the best and put up impressive performance and overclocking numbers.
• Abit KV8 Pro - The KV8 Pro BIOS comes with some great voltage options and memory adjustments. Although not as rich as the DFI LANParty UT nF3 250Gb, the KV8 Pro also provides extra memory settings than the typical CAS, TRCD, TRP, TRAS. While the VDIMM may seem a little lacking to some, it is actually enough for the popular TCCD based memory. If you own a pair of BH5 or UTT, you'll be happy to know that uGuru supplies up to 3.2v.
• Albatron 6600Ultra - The Albatron 6600U is a very impressive video card, providing some outstanding numbers and great game play detail. This card came with 128 megs on board and 16X graphics, DVI and TV-out connections which simply added to the extras. Also with the card designed with high clock speeds and using BGA memory, this unit promises has the ability for overclocking.
• MSI RX850XT 256MB PCI-Express - This card is based on the Radeon X850 chipset architecture and is, at the moment, the fastest card on the market. With 16 pixel pipelines and up to 43 billion shaders per second, the fastest and the most valuable card for gamers.
• PowerColor 550 Theater Pro TV Tuner - The PowerColor 550 Theater uses the newly designed ATI 550 Theater chipset (go figure). This particular chipset includes such features as noise filtering and a 3D comb filter which scans a frame ahead and calculates what the picture should look like. This all translates to, supposedly, a better picture with lower power consumption and CPU load.
• Seagate Pocket External 5GB Hard Drive - A portable microdrive tucked away into a small, circular, well designed plastic shell. It was envisioned by Seagate to provide consumers an easy, affordable, and convenient way to bring almost any type of data on the road with them.
• Iomega NAS 200d - The 480GB model on review is equipped with a triplet of 160GB Hitachi Serial ATA hard drives in removable carriers. These are accessed behind the front door but are only cold-swap units so the appliance must be powered down before any can be removed and replaced. The 200d is well endowed with network connectivity with a pair of Intel Gigabit Ethernet adapters and these can be teamed together for fault tolerant or high speed links.
• NEC ND-3520A - If you're looking for a fast DVD writer, the ND-3520A won't disappoint. Thanks to its 16x DVD+R and DVD-R writing speeds, the NEC's new drive took less than 6 minutes to write an entire 4.7GB DVD. This level of performance carried over to our rewriting tests where the ND-3520A turned in some very good writing times with both DVD+RW and DVD-RW media. For whatever reason though, the drive would not erase or packet write to DVD-RW discs at anything faster 4x. Writing to double layer DVD+R media wasn't a problem for the ND-3520A either. While it wasn't able to top the Plextor PX-716A, it took less than 27 minutes to burn an entire 8.5GB DVD. Unfortunately, due to the lack of media, we weren't able to test the ND-3520A's DVD-R DL writing speeds.
• Plextor PX-230A CD-RW - The PX-230A is an internal 3-in-1 CD-RW drive; writing at 52x, rewriting at 32x, and reading at 52x. Now, here's the best part. Remember what I said just a second ago about being willing to pay a little more for a Plextor? Well, PX-230A has an M.S.R.P. of only $65.
• Plextor ConvertX Personal Video Recorder - video-review @ 3DGameMan
• OCZ ModStream 450 Watt - Overall for a good looking solid performer the OCZ ModStream series is a good choice. Some improvements could be made to really make this a top of the line power supply, but it'll look great inside most anyone's case!
• Content Switches roundup - Network Computing compared four content switches (thanks Milhaus)
• Advent 7056 Laptop - The Advent 7056 is based on a Mobile Pentium 4 processor which ticks over at a reasonable 3.2GHz, with a 533MHz bus. Add to this 512MB of memory and you have a specification that can challenge many desktop PCs. The only downside is that the memory is made up of two 256MB modules taking up both the available memory slots.
• Digiana AudiaX Version 2 (FM tuner) - The ideal way would be to plug your iPod or other portable music device directly into your car stereo, but then very few offer an auxiliary input, and very few of us still have cassette decks in our car to use that type of adapter. This leaves us with really one option, barring the purchase of a new stereo deck with an aux input, that option is FM modulated transmission.
• USB Powered Thermal Wrist Protector - Supposedly, the USB Thermal Wrist Protector will alleviate some pain resulted from repetitive stress injury until you get real help. The neoprene band secures to your wrist and uses the Far Infrared Ray to create soothing heat to relax the muscles.
• Nikon CoolPix 4800 digital camera - The 4800 is a mid-range 4megapixel camera designed for the user who wants something a bit more impressive than a pocket compact but doesn't want to go to the expense of buying a full-spec semi-pro model such as the CoolPix 8800. With a comparatively low street price of around L249, the 4800 offers a tempting specification and seemingly good value for money.

GUIDES... 

• Serial ATA - technology backgrounder - James Morris explains why we need this new hard-disk connection.
• NVIDIA 6600GT Thermal Paste Upgrade - Very easy, don't be afraid, just be careful. The results speak for themselves.
• Disable Call Waiting In XP - If you are using a dial-up connection to access the Internet, you may find that you get disconnected by incoming calls, especially if you use your home phone line to dial into your ISP. You can easily fix this problem by disabling call waiting.
• Convert DVD Soundtracks to CD - Read this free tutorial on converting DVD audio to CD to find out how.
• HOWTO defeat the DRM on your coffee-maker - If you've got a Senseo coffee maker -- the kind that takes little proprietary, pre-measured coffee "pads" and converts them to hot mud -- then you've got a DRMed kitchen appliance. Those little pads contain countermeasures to keep them from being refilled and/or replaced by third-party coffee delivery-systems. This HOWTO explains how to circumvent your coffee-maker's DRM and roll your own pads.

SOFTWARE...

• New game development tools - Irrlicht Engine v0.8 (3D Engine C++) | Espresso3D v0.3 (Java-based 3D engine) | True Axis Physics SDK (physics engine) | VC++ 2005 IDE Enhancements
• CentOS-4.0 (RC1) for x86_64 - The CentOS team is happy to announce the availability of CentOS-4.0 (RC1) for x86_64. This product supports AMD Opteron, AMD Athlon64, AMD AthlonFX and Intel EM64T CPU based computers. A bittorent for the 4 CD binary installation set (in .iso format ) is available from here.
• Bluetooth AutoSync for Microsoft Smartphone 2003 - BTAutoSync SP (Bluetooth AutoSync) for Smartphone 2003, is an application which will schedule repeated, automatic ActiveSync over Bluetooth! BTAutoSync SP will "wake up" at user-defined intervals (as often as every minute) and attempt to locate your Bluetooth/ActiveSync partner desktop (over Bluetooth) and establish an ActiveSync connection.
• McAfee AVERT Stinger 2.5.2 - Stinger is a stand-alone utility used to detect and remove specific viruses. It is not a substitute for full anti-virus protection, but rather a tool to assist administrators and users when dealing with an infected system.
• ForecastFox v0.59 - ForecastFox is an extension for Firefox that displays the current and upcoming U.S. weather in the browser status bar.
• AbiWord for Windows 2.2.4 - AbiWord is a free word processing program similar to Microsoft Word. It is suitable for typing papers, letters, reports, memos, etc. It is designed to integrate perfectly with the operating system it runs on. It will take advantage of the functionality provided by the system, such as image loading or printing capabilities.
• Directory Printer 5.01 - Karen's Directory Printer can print the name of every file on a drive, along with the file's size, date and time of last modification, and attributes (Read-Only, Hidden, System and Archive)! And now, the list of files can be sorted by name, size, date created, date last modified, or date of last access.
• Style XP 3.01 - Style XP (download) is theming software that helps customize the way your Windows XP, Windows XP Service Pack 1, Tablet PC, or Server 2003 system looks. Style XP can manage and rotate themes, visual styles, backgrounds, and logons, which are freely available at ThemeXP. Now with Win XP SP2 Final support.
• Yahoo! Messenger 6.0.0.1921 - Yahoo!'s Instant Messenger (download) service has been updated again.
• PuTTY beta v0.57 - PuTTY is a free implementation of Telnet and SSH for Win32 and Unix platforms, along with an xterm terminal emulator. The new version fixes two security holes which can allow a malicious SFTP server to execute code of its choice on a PSCP or PSFTP client connecting to it.
• FileZilla 2.2.11 - FileZilla is a fast FTP and SFTP client (download) for Windows with a lot of features. FileZilla Server is a reliable FTP server. This new minor version fixes a critical security vulnerabilty  which may allow remote code execution.
• RegDefend v1.000 - RegDefend is a kernel based registry protection system, designed to use as few resources as possible. Instead of polling the registry looking for changes, RegDefend intercepts the changes before they occur. RegDefend comes installed to protect registry autostarts and some special registry keys, custom rules can also be added.
• Keyboard Tweaker 2.1 - Keyboard Tweaker is a Hotkeys manager. It transform a normal keyboard with 101/102 keys into a multimedia keyboard using the hotkeys. The program sets some combinations to the keyboard keys for a function.
• Nero Burning Rom 6.6.0.8 - Nero has released an updated version of Nero on its FTP mirrors. They also released version 1.4.0.29 of its Nero Media Player and NeroMIX 1.4.0.29.
• PlexTools Professional V2.20 - Plextor has today released a new version of their PlexTools Professional software
• ATITool 0.24 Beta 2 - ATITool is an overclocking utility designed for ATI video cards.
• VIA Sound Drivers (Vinyl Stylus Audio) v.5.80c - VIA Tech has released new drivers (changelog) for the internal AC97 sound in their chipsets i.e. south bridges VT82C686A, VT82C686B, VT8231, VT8233, VT8233A, VT8233B, VT8233C, VT8235, VT8237, VT8287. The driver can also be found on Guru3D.
• Xtreme G 71.81 (ForceWare) - This is the Xtreme G driver which includes many performance and Image Quality tweaks. These are modified NVIDIA ForceWare drivers for Win2k/XP. 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
• ForceWare 75.90 Win2k/XP - These drivers support everything ever made by NVIDIA, multiple info files with device info on many devices are included, setup.exe and of course it's multi-language supported.