SECURITY...

• Mozilla patches bugs in Firefox, Thunderbird - The Mozilla Foundation today fixed a number of security bugs in its Firefox Web browser, many of which will also be patched in upcoming releases of Mozilla's Thunderbird e-mail client and Mozilla Internet software suite.
  None of the bugs had been publicly divulged before today, and they are generally not considered to be critical, said Chris Hofmann, director of engineering with The Mozilla Foundation.
• Flaws could open systems to attack - Two serious security flaws in a technology widely used for network authentication could expose a swath of software products to hacker attack, experts have warned. The flaws could allow an online intruder to crash or gain access to computers running Kerberos, a freely available authentication technology that was developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
• Anti Spyware Coalition defines what it is spyware -  A new industry grouping calling itself the Anti Spyware Coalition (ASC) has begun its life with an existential question: What exactly is the spyware that it is anti? It has also come up with definitions for such nasties as 'adware,' 'port scanner,' and 'screen scraper'. It is asking the public for their feedback to the definitions, although submissions need to be in by 12 August.

OFFTOPIC...

• MMOG romance ends in divorce - For a Mr. Wang of Chongqing, China, it's definitely the latter. He's currently involved in a bitter dispute over ownership of characters and virtual items in Legend of Mir 2 with his soon-to-be ex-wife, Ms. Ye.  According to the Chongqing Business Post, Ye and Wang met online whilst playing the game last September and married four weeks later. Over the following months they jointly opened more than ten LoM2 accounts and attained level 40 to 50 status for all of their characters, before deciding to divorce in June.
• Majesco Creating Ghost Rider Movie Game - The Hollywood Reporter says that Majesco Entertainment is creating a video game based on Marvel's Ghost Rider for summer 2006, coinciding with the Sony Pictures/Marvel Studios movie starring Nicolas Cage.
• First Pictures From Comic-Con 2005 - ComingSoon.net/SuperheroHype.com has your first look at the 2005 Comic-Con International in San Diego, taking place Thursday through Sunday, with pictures from the various movie displays on the floor
• Ebbers jailed for 25 years - Bernie Ebbers has been sentenced to 25 years behind bars for his part in the $11bn (L5.8bn) fraud at US telco WorldCom, accordng to AP.

TECHNOLOGY...

• Does Intel's compiler cripple AMD performance? - One of the claims in AMD's sensational antitrust complaint against Intel has been getting some play around the web lately. Specifically, folks are focusing on what AMD says about Intel compilers and how they react to the presence of AMD processors.
• Consumers choose Blu-Ray over HD-DVD - A new survey has revealed that when it comes to next-generation disc formats, consumers are currently favouring Sony's preferred Blu-Ray system, which will be used in the PlayStation 3, over Toshiba's HD-DVD
• Skype Goes Wireless - Skype International and Boingo Wireless announced a partnership this week that will allow users to access Skype's VoIP (voice over Internet Protocol) technology from 18,000 Wi-Fi hot spots worldwide.
• IBM Developed New Tracing Keyboard System - IBM has developed Shark (Shorthand-Aided Rapid Keyboarding) ,an advanced pen-based shorthand method that allows users to input words into mobile devices by tracing them letter by letter on a virtual keyboard. Instead of tapping independently on four virtual keys with a stylus to spell "word," for example, consumers would put the stylus on "w" and then carve a continuous trail all the way to "d." "What we are doing is creating a human-machine code," said Shumin Zhai, a research staff member at IBM Almaden Research Center, said during a presentation at the New Paradigms for Using Computers conference in Silicon Valley on Monday.
• New Way to Make Hydrogen - The process uses sodium which industry shuns because it generates sparks and heat when mixed with water. Signa has devised a way to mix sodium with silica gel or crystalline silicon to create a powder that essentially strips electrons from the sodium molecules in advance and stores them. When water is introduced, the chemical reaction proceeds calmly. The powder generates hydrogen efficiently. More than 9 percent of a kilogram of the powder gets converted to hydrogen and little energy is lost through heat.
• Mobile Phone Fuel Cells Coming in 2007  - A fuel cell technology that promises a quick fix for dead or dying mobile phone batteries may make its world debut in Japan in 2007, according to representatives of Japan's two biggest mobile communications carriers today at the Wireless Japan 2005 Expo.
• Xbox 360 GPU to be manufactured by TSMC - The Inquirer is reporting that Taiwanese Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSMC), will take care of R500 production for the Vole. This decision was easy as TSMC is in a much better position with its 90 nanometre yields and production and as we said many times before Microsoft needs millions of those chips as soon as possible.

HARDWARE... 

• NVIDIA GeForce 7800GT Has 20 Pipes - VR-Zone has learned that the upcoming GeForce 7800 GT will be 20 pipes instead of 24 pipes as intially reported. The vertex shader could probably stay at 8 and ROP at 16. The core clock for 7800GT is 400MHz instead of 335MHz initially thought. It will be interesting to see if the 4 hidden pipes can unlocked on the 7800 GT to become GTX. The 7800GT is slated for launch on 11th Aug at Quakecon 2005 and MRSP for this card is US$449.
• Matrox announces PCI Express x1 graphics card -  The card is based on Matrox G550 technology and has DualHead support for using 2 digital or analog monitors at a time. The Millennium G550 PCIe will be available in August for $139, which is rather expensive for a card with such a dated graphics core.
• Nvidia 6600 LE series graphics cards to be priced at US$60-70 - Nvidia will introduce its 6600 LE series SLI (Scalable Link Interface)-supporting graphics processing unit (GPU) in early August, and the FOB (free on board) price of 6600 LE graphics cards is expected to be US$60-70, according to sources at graphics card makers.
• Dell Inspiron 2200 - The base 2200 features an Intel Celeron Processor at 1.4Ghz, 256MB DDR RAM, 40GB HD, and 14" XGA TFT active-matrix display. All this can be had for $899. An upgrade package that offers a 1.5 Ghz M processor, twice the memory, 20 extra gigs of HD space, and a 15" screen, for just $100 more.
• AMD's Athlon64 X2 Processors - Performance wise, we are confident in saying that the Athlon64 X2 4800+ is the fastest overall processor on the market today. The vast majority of multi-threaded applications showed the 4800+ at the top of the benchmark charts, and it only falls behind to the Athlon64 FX series in gaming. Even in games, the 4800+ chip is only a small amount behind the FX. The chip is far more balanced compared to the Intel's dual-core Pentium-D/EE processors when handling single threaded applications
• ULi M1695 PCIe/AGP Socket 939 for Athlon 64 - The new ULi M1695/M1567 chipset is both unique in its full-blown AGP support on a PCIe board and fully competitive in performance with the best Athlon 64 solutions currently available. PCIe performance could use a bit more tuning, but it is already competitive. If ULi can bring PCIe performance to the levels that they currently enjoy with AGP on this same board, this could well be the fastest Athlon 64 chipset that you can buy. We could wish for SATA 2 support and integrated Gigabit LAN, but even those are coming with the M1575 South Bridge slated for September/October production. 
• ASUS P5LD2 Deluxe motherboard - There is virtually no difference between the layout and design of the P5WD2 Premium and P5LD2 Deluxe motherboards. The P5WD2 Premium is of course more expensive as it does utilize the 955X chipset. The only other noticeable difference other than this is that the P5LD2 Deluxe only features a single Gigabit LAN controller. The P5WD2 Premium was a superb overclocker and if the P5LD2 Deluxe can match or better the overclocking performance it is going to be a serious product.
• ATI All-In-Wonder Radeon X800 XL for PCI E - The ATI All-In-Wonder Radeon X800 XL for PCI Express differs from the AGP version in only a couple of areas physically. Firstly, a Microtune MT2121 silicon tuner sits under the gold-coloured cover. The MT21xx series is a pin-compatible evolution of the MT20xx series, with the biggest difference being the ability to tune DVB-T digital television broadcasts.
• Wacom Intuos3 6x8 graphic tablet - The original Intuos was a great product no doubt. With the introduction of the Intuos3, Wacom has taken user suggestions and built upon that. The improved resolution of the product was apparant especially in programs such a Photoshop which could take full advantage of the 1024 levels of pressure sensitivity. it's hard to describe the impact of the increased resolution, but I'd have to say that it was characterized by an even greater level of smoothness.
• iRiver T10 Series Photo-Video-MP3 Player - This photo/video/audio player supports MP3, WMA, ASF, OGG, MPEG 1, 2, 2.5 and BMP formats.

GUIDES...

• MD Athlon FX-57 Overclocking - 3.54GHz with Phase Change - The Athlon 64 FX-57 is an overclocker's dream chip. Unlike regular Athlon 64 processors, it is totally unlocked. This means that the lower as well as the higher range multipliers are available.
• Peter Nordahl's NT Password and Registry Editor Boot Disk - This great tool will help you to recover NT system from administrator password loss. This utility allows to (re)set the password of any user that has a valid account on your NT system.

SOFTWARE...

• G70 demo's available for download - GeForce 7 series is an improvement over the GeForce 6-series in terms of capabilities - we're still on DirectX 9.0c, Shader Model 3.0-based hardware, so there are no shader-based improvements, meaning that it will run on GeForce 6 video cards. For those of you who don't have a GeForce 6-series of GeForce 7800 GTX video card, you will be able to watch the demo's in Windows Media Player. There are two demo's: Luna (demo | movie) and Mad Mod Mike (demo | movie).
• MAME v0.98 - MAME stands for Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator  and currently runs 1800+ classic (and even some not so classic) arcade games.
• Macromedia Flash Player 8.0 Beta - This Public Beta is a pre-release version of the next major release of Flash Player.
• AIM v5.9.3828 Beta - AOL instant Messenger (download) service is a free online service that lets you communicate with family, friends and co-workers in real time. Using the AIM Buddy List feature you can see when your buddies are online and available to instant message.
• UPnPScanner - Scan Your Network For UPnP Capable Devices - UPnPScanner scans the LAN or a given address range for UPnP capable devices. This is done by sending M-SEARCH discovery packets to either the UPnP multicast address or to the specified ip range.
• Sysinternals PageDefrag 2.32 - PageDefrag (download) uses advanced techniques to provide you what commercial defragmenters cannot: the ability for you to see how fragmented your paging files and Registry hives are, and to defragment them. In addition, it defragments event log files and Windows 2000/XP hibernation files (where system memory is saved when you hibernate a laptop).
• MozBackup 1.4.1 - MozBackup (download) is a utility for creating backups of Mozilla, Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla Thunderbird and Netscape profiles. It allows you to backup mail, favorites, contacts, etc.
• RightMark RAMTester Utility 1.0 Beta 2 - The RAMTester tool (download) that is meant for checking memory modules reliability under MS Windows (x86 and x64) on the example of virtual addresses. The idea of this utility is writing bit patterns into memory and then reading and comparing them with reference.
• Browser Hijack Retaliator 3 - Real time protection for your Internet Explorer (IE) all Default pages, BHO's, Favorites etc. 'Browser Restore' operation allows you to reset your IE to default settings while 'Startup Manager' allows you to eliminate suspicious Programs form startup.
• AnyDVD to version 5.2.3.1. - This version is able to bypass the latest Sony ARccOS protection which has made it difficult for many to make legitmate backups of their DVDs. AnyDVD is a Windows driver which unprotects encrypted movie DVDs automatically in the background and is also able to remove Macrovision and Region protection
• nVidia BIOS Modifier v1.1 - This tool (NBM) is intended for modification of BIOSes of nVidia 6x00 and 7x00 cards ONLY.
• Intel Chipset Installation Utility 7.2.1.1003 - The Intel Chipset Software Installation Utility (release notes) installs to the target system the Windows* INF files that outline to the operating system how the chipset components will be configured. This release adds Intel 955X Express Chipset & Intel 6300ESB Chipset support.
• Realtek AC'97 Drivers 3.74 WHQL - This driver (download) supports all ALC series audio chipsets from ALC101 up to ALC861. It is used as onboard sound on many motherboards. Chips covered include ALC101/201/202/203/250/650/653/655/658/861.
• DNA-Force 1.8.8040 (ForceWare) - These are modified NVIDIA ForceWare drivers for Windows 2000 & 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.
• DNA-ATi 4.0.5.6 Full - These are modified/hacked ATI Catalyst drivers, use them at your own risk. The drivers have been optimized with two things in mind, better Image Quality and more/stable frames per second when compared to the Beta Catalyst drivers from ATI.