SECURITY...

• Napster DRM Cracked - Neowin previously reported on the work done by Cody Brocious to get iTunes working on Linux; in a soon to be released updated version, Cody and his group have announced plans to support the Napster Music Store as well.  However, in the process of making PyMusique work with Napster, the group have broken the Digital Rights Management (DRM) system that the company uses. Unlike Apple's iTunes, the DRM is applied "server-side", making the decryption process a lot more complicated. The team have formulated a method for removing the DRM on WMA files allowing them to play on non-Windows systems.
• IM worm hits Reuters - Reuters was temporarily forced to shut down its instant messaging service Thursday after a computer worm spread across its network. The culprit - Kelvir-U - is a variant of a worm family that targets MSN and Windows Messenger clients and previously posed no risk to Reuters' tightly-controlled messaging network. This is the first incident where a virus has targeted a privately controlled user community, IM security firm IMlogic reports.
• Fortinet in court for hiding Linux in its code - Fortinet was accused of using cryptographic techniques to conceal the presence of Linux code in its FortiGate and FortiWifi products, as well as not releasing its source code under the terms of the GPL.
• Record industry sues 400 campus downloaders - The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has filed copyright infringement lawsuits against 405 students accused of sharing digital content across a high-speed university computer network known as Internet2.
• Arrests Made in Nintendo Sting - Police arrested four people in connection with videogame piracy in New York and New Jersey yesterday, according to The Associated Press. Officers of the law confiscated more than 60,000 pirated products from Nintendo, including Donkey Kong, Mario Brothers, Duck Hunt, among others, according to official reports filed by federal authorities at the U.S. District Court in Manhattan. So, how did this merry band of digital thieves slip up? They tried selling the truckload of stolen goods to undercover FBI agents, that's how.
• Bush fears his personal e-mail would be made public - President Bush said Thursday that he does not send e-mail, not even to his twin daughters, because he fears "my personal stuff" would be made public.
• Unchecked blogs a boon to hackers - Blogging sites that fail to check software stored by users are proving useful to hackers, according to web monitoring firm Websense. The company claims to have identified hundreds of cases of hackers using blogs to store Trojan software and other malicious code, because blogging firms seldom check to see what code they are hosting.
• Multiple TCP/IP implementations do not adequately validate ICMP error messages - Multiple TCP/IP implementations do not adequately validate ICMP error messages. A remote attacker could cause TCP connections to drop or be degraded using spoofed ICMP error messages.

OFFTOPIC...

• Area 51 secrets unveiled by Google  - If you want to go take a peek around Area 51 for yourself, have a look at this ilustrated guide here. It's a fascinating read.
• "Minority Report" interface created for US military - A computer interface inspired by the futuristic system portrayed in the movie Minority Report, starring Tom Cruise, could soon help real military personnel deal with information overload.

TECHNOLOGY...

• Microsoft Reveals Longhorn Details - Allchin, group vice president of Microsoft's Platforms Group, described Longhorn as nothing less than "the OS platform for the next ten years." It's on track for Beta 1 release this summer and final release for the 2006 holiday season. Although the Avalon graphics system, Indigo Web services system, and WinFS file system (now slated to ship sometime after Longhorn) have gotten the most attention, Microsoft's design goals focus on six key points, Allchin says: 1. It just works, 2. Safe and secure, 3. Easy to deploy and manage, 4. Client experiences - at work, at home, and on the go, 5. The right server for your business, 6. OS platform for the next ten years.
• AMD may cut Sempron prices in early May - AMD plans to lower the unit prices for Socket 754 Sempron processors in early May, with the maximum cut being 15%, according to Taiwan motherboard makers.
• AMD Confirms AMD Dual-Core Opteron Launch on the April 21st - AMD CEO Hector Ruiz said Wednesday during the company's first quarter fiscal 2005 conference call that the company's first server dual-core chips with two processing engines will be formally announced on the 21st of April, 2005
• Seagate Readies New Hard Drive Technology - Seagate Technology is developing a perpendicular recording technology for hard drives and intends to be one of the first companies to use it in its products, the company said this week.

HARDWARE... 

• Acer TravelMate 8104WLMi - Sonoma laptop - Beating at the heart of the 8104WLMi is a 2GHz Pentium M CPU, backed up by 1GB of 533MHz DDR2 memory. The PCI Express support in Sonoma is highlighted by the inclusion of an ATI Mobility Radeon X700 graphics chipset with 128MB of memory.
• Acer n35 GPS PDA - The Acer N35 is the second PDA I've looked at to feature a GPS receiver actually integrated into the PDA, the first being the Mio 168. For the GPS enthusiast this is great as it avoids the need to have any trailing wires to an external GPS receiver or having to rely on a Bluetooth unit that
  runs on batteries. While the Mio 168 used CoPilot as its navigation software, Acer has plumped for Destinator 3.
• AMD Sempron 3300+ CPU - When we look at the grid above, the Sempron 3300+ brings a couple of new things to the table compared to the elder 3100+. Based on the "Palermo" core, AMD is manufacturing the 3300+ at .09 microns with half of the L2 Cache complement of the .13 micron 3100+. With 128KB of L2 cache, the Sempron 3300+ is clocked 200MHz faster than the 3100+, running at 2.0GHz. Additionally, AMD has added support for SSE3 instructions, something only the Celeron offered up until now, as far as budget CPUs go anyway. Another review can be found on HotHardware.
• SimpleTech PC2-4200 DDR2 - The chips scaled very well. As mentioned, I was able to take them above 350 MHz into Windows, however at an increased latency, 5-5-5-12, and increased voltage, 2.2V. Stability testing was out of the question as the processor would just throttle the FSB down as load picked up. Otherwise, 333 MHz was completely stable and at a 4-4-4-12 latency - over 25% faster than the rated speed and at nearly the same latencies. I was very impressed for what I was told is just standard, no frills memory.
• Swiftech H20-120-T TEC Liquid Cooling Kit - The maximum achievable speed with a 3.0GHz D0 stepping Prescott was 4.35GHz with a full load temperature of 62 degrees Celsius at which point the processor starts to throttle. I expect this kit to work much better with the newer E0 and N0 stepping Prescott cores along with the much cooler Athlon 64 CPUs.
• Samsung SyncMaster 915N - Samsung steps up to the gaming plate with 915N for the gamer that wants to have a larger screen. This monitor is rated at 8ms response time! They also now make smaller monitors that also have 12ms response time. The only problem I have seen with this product line is so far they are VGA interface only and do not support DVI. On the other hand leaving DVI out does let Samsung sell this monitor at a less expensive price. This monitor can be found under 400.00 dollars from many online retailers.
• Lexmark P315 printer - These mini ink-jet printers are designed specifically for photo printing and offer little, if anything, in the way of plain paper print. Lexmark's P315 goes one step further by dispensing with the PC altogether. You can print from a variety of memory cards or from any camera that supports the PictBridge standard, but you can't print from a desktop, notebook or PDA.
• Samsung CLP-510N Laser Printer - Samsung has come out with a very good printer with the CLP-510/510N series of printers. The print quality of the printer is excellent on the black print, and the color rivals inkjet photo quality printers when using the glossier paper designed to print photos on. The real question will be once you get to 50,000 pages - do you buy a new drum and transfer unit for $300.00 for the set or do you just buy a new printer?
• LTB AC97-M 5.1 Surround Headphones - They're excellent headphones, sound great, are very comfortable, & I would certainly buy them over the Theatre 6's because of their smaller size & integrated microphone.
• AL Tech MediaGate MG-25 Portable Media Center - As you may have guessed, this is more than just an external hard drive. This "MPEG4+MP3 jukebox" allows you to store images, videos, and music on the internal hard drive, organizing and playing them back however you like. It's significantly cheaper (and smaller) than any HTPC and with the exception of games and the possible use of applications, can do all the same things.
• Sony PSP - Certainly, its not flawless with the dead pixel issue and Sony's insistence on using Memory Stick when SD cards are already available in 1GB flavours, though having said that, Memory Stick is their proprietary card and this is their unit so they can do what they like… those of us who have loads of SD cards and no Memory Sticks will just have to go and buy some, eh?

GUIDES... 

• NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT Buyer's Guide - The default configuration of the GeForce 6800 GT  comes with a 350MHz core and 256MB of 1,000MHz memory. The core contains 16 pixel pipelines, the maximum number available for the GeForce 6 series design. Even with these impressive specifications, the GeForce 6800 GT plays second string to video cards like the GeForce 6800 Ultra and the Radeon X850.
• 3D performance with Splinter Cell Chaos Theory part 2: ATI mainstream cards - check it out
• A Windows XP Optimization Guide - 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.

SOFTWARE...

• xp-Antispy 3.94 - The xp-AntiSpy is a little utility that lets you disable some built-in update and authentication 'features' in WindowsXP. This new version fixes some minor bugs. (thanks Csimbi)
• Sysinternal's Process Explorer 9.03 - The unique capabilities of Process Explorer make it useful for tracking down DLL-version problems or handle leaks, and provide insight into the way Windows and applications work.
• Sysinternal's Regmon 7.0 - Regmon is a Registry monitoring utility that will show you which applications are accessing your Registry, which keys they are accessing, and the Registry data that they are reading and writing - all in real-time.
• Sysinternal's FileMon 7.0 - FileMon monitors and displays file system activity on a system in real-time. Its advanced capabilities make it a powerful tool for exploring the way Windows works, seeing how applications use the files and DLLs, or tracking down problems in system or application file configurations
• G-Force 2.8.1 - G-Force (download) is a music visualization plug-in for media players and can also visualize auxiliary or "line-in" audio. G-Force features fast anti-aliased effects, millions of possible visual combinations, savable and scriptable effects, and unparalleled expandability.
• RightMark CPU Clock Utility v1.5 - RightMark CPU Clock Utility (RMClock) is a small GUI application designed for real-time CPU frequency, throttling and load level monitoring and on-the-fly adjustment of the CPU performance level of the supported CPUs via processor's power management model-specific registers (MSRs). In automatic management mode it continuously monitors the CPU usage level and dynamically adjusts the CPU frequency, throttle and/or voltage level as needed.
• nLite 0.99.9 Beta - nLite lets you choose which components to remove from your Windows 2000, XP or 2003 before installation.
• SpyBot-Search & Destroy 1.4 RC1 - Spybot-S&D 1.4 Release Candidate 1 is available. If you want to test it, they recommend you take a look at their beta forums.
• Maxthon (MyIE2) v1.2.3 - Maxthon (MyIE2) (download combo / standard) is a powerful web browser with a highly customizable interface. It is based on the Internet Explorer engine (your most likely current web browser) which means that what works in IE, works the same in Maxthon but with many additional efficient features.
• eXeem 0.24 Public Beta - eXeem (download) is a brand new Peer-To-Peer program, which is based on the BitTorrent idea.
• CloneCD and CloneDVD betas - Slysoft has released beta versions of CloneCD and CloneDVD. The main change in the versions is support for 64-bit Windows XP. To achieve this the ElbyCDIO has been rewritten.
• Nero CD-DVD Speed V3.80 and Nero InfoTool V3.01 - This tool can be used to test the capabilities of your CD or DVD drive and we use this software in our reviews to test the performance and make comparisons. Some of the tests include: Transfer rate, Seek times, CPU usage, Burst rate, DAE quality, Spinup/spindown time.
• BenQ 1620 firmware - The firmware update brings the firmware revision to B7V9 and improves compatibility with the Nforce chipset, as well as fixing an issue with nero's simulation mode. Support for MJC 16x +R media, Gig 16x DVD-R media and Ritek 16x DVD-R F1 media has also been added.
• SIS AGP Driver v.1.21 - SIS have released a new AGP driver v1.21 supporting most of their chipsets. The only updated AGP driver contained in this driver pack appears to be the 64-bit AGP driver, all other drivers are identical to those included in the 1.19 driver pack (1.17 in the case of WinXP) (thanks Warp2Search)