Nightly Tech Madness - tech
(hx) 02:58 AM CEST - Oct,26 2004
- Post a comment SECURITY...
- Microsoft Revises Anti-Spam Standard - Microsoft on Monday
said
it had revised its proposal to weed out "spam" e-mail to win over
skeptical Internet engineers who have been reluctant to adopt technology owned
by the dominant software company. Microsoft officials said they have revised
their SenderID protocol to work better with an existing standard and have
narrowed their patent application to make sure it does not cover other
proposals.
- Fake RedHat - Fedora Security Patch / Trojan Source Code & Analysis -
Emails that pretend to come from the Red Hat Security Team are circulating
in the wild. These emails tell users to download and install malicious
updates. These trojan updates contain malicious code designed to compromise
the systems they are run on.
- EBay virus "start of worrying trend" -
Security experts
have intercepted a virus which claims to have been sent from eBay.com and
uses a packer previously unseen in email virus distribution. The use of the
uncommon packer in the W32/Myfip virus could make it more difficult for
antivirus software vendors to identify and protect against the malicious code
within, signalling "the start of a worrying trend", MessageLabs warned today.
- Cisco adds scrambler to IP telephony -
Cisco is beefing up the security of IP telephony kit with an upgrade to
its software available from today. A new version of the network giant's IP PBX
software, Cisco CallManager 4.1, comes with new enhanced encryption
facilities, including Voice over Virtual Private Network (V3PN) functionality.
Encryption features had previously only been available on Cisco's high-end
phones - such as the 7960G - but the vendor is now making the technology more
mainstream. The majority (2.5m out of 3.5m) of the IP phones Cisco has shipped
thus far will be able to use the enhanced scrambling technology after users
upgrade their software.
- Would John Kerry Defang the DMCA? - Over at
ZDNet Declan McCullagh asks, "Would John Kerry defang the DMCA?" Kerry's
response: "open to examining" whether to change current law "to ensure that a
person who lawfully obtains or receives a transmission of a digital work may
back up a copy of it for archival purposes". It's not clear, though, how
serious Kerry truly is"
- U.S. moves closer to e-passports - The State Department plans to
produce
more than 1 million e-passports by the end of 2005 and, by 2006, it
expects all new passports to feature the special microchips, according to
Angela Aggeler, a spokeswoman for the agency’s Bureau of Consular Affairs.
TECHNOLOGY...
- Microsoft's Worst Nightmare - Blake Ross is lounging at his
parents' Florida Keys condo, thinking ahead to his first day back at Stanford.
His goal for his sophomore year: nothing less than
to "take back the Web" from Microsoft.You might think the shy 19-year-old
is outmatched. Think again. Ross, a software prodigy who interned at Netscape
at age 14, is the lead architect behind Mozilla's Firefox -- a revolutionary
new browser that's catching on the way Mosaic did in 1993. In beta for the
past four months, Firefox version 1.0 is set to be released in November. With
that, Ross will issue the first truly formidable challenge to Internet
Explorer that the world has seen in seven years. "We're hoping for 10 million
downloads in 10 days," Ross says proudly.
- Peeping Tom filter lets phones see through bikinis - A developer in
Tokyo has created an add-on for Vodafone handsets that's meant to be used as a
night filter to let people take pictures with their phones in the dark.
Unfortunately, the night vision camera has an unexpected side effect,
according to Japanese developer Yamada Denshi. In the right circumstances, it
allows users to see a lot more than they bargained for. As well as taking
snaps in the dark, the Yamada Denshi infrared filter apparently sees through
people's clothes. The problem arises because the filter uses the distribution
of heat to create its pictures. When attached to a high-end camera, the filter
can see though certain kinds of clothing and is reportedly particularly
effective on dark bikinis
- [R.I.P.] - Xbox writer, web founder taken off life support - Short
Media said that
Keith
"Mortin" Whitsitt was taken off life support in a Gainesville Florida
hospital. He had suffered massive brain damage following a gunshot wound, the
site said. Keith started website
Icrontic.com and wrote many
articles about the Xbox.
- UF scientist: "Brain" in a dish acts as autopilot, living computer -
University of Florida scientist has grown a living "brain" that can fly a
simulated plane, giving scientists a novel way to observe how brain cells
function as a network. The "brain" --
a
collection of 25,000 living neurons, or nerve cells, taken from a rat's brain
and cultured inside a glass dish -- gives scientists a unique real-time
window into the brain at the cellular level. By watching the brain cells
interact, scientists hope to understand what causes neural disorders such as
epilepsy and to determine noninvasive ways to intervene. As living computers,
they may someday be used to fly small unmanned airplanes or handle tasks that
are dangerous for humans, such as search-and-rescue missions or bomb damage
assessments.
- Adobe, Yahoo to Integrate Products - Adobe and Yahoo on Monday said
they
have signed a deal to combine Adobe services, like its widely used
document-sharing program, with Yahoo's Web search functions. The joint product
allows a user to search for information in Adobe Portable Document Format, or
PDF, documents -- the primary standard for sharing electronic files -- posted
on the Web.
- Intel Prepares for the Next 20 Years - Intel is drawing the
curtain on some of its future research projects to continue making transistors
smaller, faster, and less power-hungry out as far as 2020. In a recent
briefing for reporters and analysts at the company's headquarters here, Intel
researchers discussed
exotic materials such as carbon nanotubes and nanowires as well as novel
techniques to take the transistor down to the atomic level.
- Low-power screens boost notebook battery life - The Mobile PC
Extended Battery Life Working Group (EBL-WG) today
claimed to have
reached "a major milestone" in its initiative to promote low-power display
panel technology. According to the group, more than six million low-power
12.1/14.1/15.0 XGA display panels with a power consumption of 3 Watts or less
will ship globally in 2004. It said these units accounted for about 12 per
cent of total estimated global notebook shipments.
HARDWARE...
- Sony launches music players with MP3 support - As expected,
the company announced the release in Europe of two flash-memory-based devices,
the Walkman NW-E99 and NW-E95, which can natively play songs in MP3 and Sony's
own Atrac file format. The move, discussed by the company on Monday, diverges
from its previous position of not supporting MP3 because of its lack of
security measures and susceptibility to easy file sharing.
- Sony Ericsson introduces new quad-band EDGE/Wi-Fi PC card -
The GC89 PC Card combines global EDGE coverage with the WiFi technology in
a single card which is compatible with both Windows and Macintosh computers.
The GC89 card delivers connectivity through EDGE, GPRS, CSD, SMS over the GSM
850, 900, 1800 and 1900 bands world-wide. And, for those areas covered by
wireless local networks (homes, offices, and hotspot locations such as airport
lounges, coffee shops and hotels) the GC89 provides 802.11b and g connectivity
with speed potential in excess of 50 Megabits per second.
- AMD's Personal Internet Communicator revealed - The folks at
AMDboard.com have a news and info roundup on
AMD's Personal
Internet Communicator, complete with pictures of the device. The computer
is about the size of a tissue box and runs on a 366 MHz AMD Geode GX 500
processor that uses 1 watt of power.
- Alienware debuts gaming system with NVIDIA SLI - Alienware is
taking orders for
Area-51
ALX gaming systems featuring NVIDIA SLI technology. The water-cooled
systems are decked out with dual GeForce 6800 Ultra graphics cards, but
saddled with Nocona-core Xeon processors. With an estimated shipping date of
December 1, ALX systems could be the first commercially-available NVIDIA SLI
platforms. However, with nForce4 SLI on the way and the Athlon 64 trashing the
Pentium 4 in games, more appropriate and affordable SLI platforms may be
available before long.
- Nvidia reacts to lack of Nforce4 Soundstorm - TheInquirer has
managed to get
an
official response from top Nvidia chipset man Drew Henry about the lack of
support for Sound Storm in its forthcoming Nforce 4 chipsets.
- NV41 to quietly replace 6800 standard - From the beginning, Nvidia
wanted to make some kind of cheaper to produce 6800 standard card and that's
what NV41 is all about. There is a slight change of interface as NV41 is PCI
Express. It will use exactly the same clock speeds as the 6800 Standard AGP
card. NV41
based cards will be branded as Geforce 6800 PCIe and will come as PCIe
cards only.
- ATI Radeon X700 XT / PRO review -
Ostensibly Radeon X700 is designed as a mainstream part, with the remit of
bringing last years high end performance to mainstream prices, however rather
than just taking onboard a Radeon 9800 configuration, X700 has only a 128-bit
memory bus, 8 fragment / pixel pipelines, and 6 vertex shaders. In this review
we take a closer look at the architecture, and put both a reference ATI X700
XT platform and a retail Sapphire Hybrid X700 PRO board to the test.
- GALAXY GeForce 6600 256MB review - GALAXY's
card comes in at the upper end of that scale, thanks to a healthy 256MB of
onboard RAM. Looking at Hexus.net's benchmark numbers that include a few older
titles, it's apparent that NV43 performance makes looking at previous
generation's midrange cards.. What's more, GALAXY's PCI-Express 6600 card
doesn't require auxillary power and the GPU's fan is pretty damn quiet,
although a few sacrifices have to be made for the cheaper NV43 part, as
there's no SLI capability and a distinct lack of memory bandwidth from the
128-bit interface."
- BenQ DW1620 16x DVD+-RW Double Layer Writer review - Not to be
confused with the DW1610,
the new
DW1620 offers the same capabilities but adds support for double layer
writing. While not a 4x double layer writer, this drive is set to compete
against the Lite-On SOHW-1633s and LG GSA-4160B.
- Water Cooler Roundup - To help you make the plunge, TrustedReviews
have decided to take
a
closer look at three different approaches to water-cooling, each
theoretically suited to a different level of experience.
SOFTWARE...
- Multilingual User Interface Packs for WMP 10 -
Windows Media Player Multilingual User Interface Packs are available for
download for 25 non-English language versions of Windows XP. Individual
language versions of the User Interface Packs are available for download, and
users are able to choose the specific target language version of the language
that they want to enable.
- Coding Workshop Polyphonic Wizard 3.7.1 -
The Coding Workshop
Polyphonic Wizard (download)
is a software program for your PC that allows you to add new ringtones and
pictures to your polyphonic phone without the need for cables or sms (text)
services. All you need is your phone and this software to add new polyphonic
ringtones! All the technical details are taken care of. All you need to do is
pick a midi file, use the trim tool to select the part you want, then send it
to your phone.
- Coding Workshop Ringtone Convertor 5.2.3 -
The Ringtone Converter (download)
is a software program for both Microsoft Windows and Apple Mac systems that
allows you to add new ringtones to your mobile phone without the need for
cables or expensive premium rate SMS services. The Ringtone Converter supports
most makes and models of phone including Audiovox, Alcatel, Ericsson, HTC,
Kyocera, Motorola, Nokia, NEC, Panasonic, Philips, Sagem, Samsung, Sony,
Sendo, Sharp and Siemens handsets, with more added every month.
- MAME v0.88 - MAME
stands for Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator, and currently runs 1800+ classic
(and even some not so classic) arcade games.
- Maxthon Combo 1.1.050 - Maxthon
(formerly MyIE2) (download)
is a powerful web browser with a highly customizable interface. It is based on
the Internet Explorer engine which means that what works in IE, works the same
in Maxthon but with many additional efficient features like Tabbed Browsing
Interface; Mouse Gestures; Super Drag&Drop; Privacy Protection; AD Hunter;
Google Bar Support; External Utility Bar; and Skinning.
- CloneCD v5.0.4.2 - SlySoft has released
an update of
their CloneCD (download)
software. According to
the changelog this update fixes a problem with the Plextor DVD recorders.
- XP-AntiSpy 3.92 -
XP-AntiSpy (download)
is a small program that let's you disable some built-in update and
authetication features in Windows XP. This new version adds
Profile/Userdefined profiles, online help, connection limit now works on build
2505 and build 1208 of the tcpip.sys files, and much more.
- Nero 6 Reloaded 6.6.0.1 -
Nero (download
~ mirror1,
mirror2) is a flexible,
reliable, and easy-to-use application designed to write both data and CD audio
to CD-R and CD-RW discs. It supports ISO 9660 images as well as ISO mode 1 and
XA mode 2, and allows for on-the-fly disc recording in addition to overburning
(if supported by hardware). There's also a new
Nero Media Player v1.4.0.25,
Nero Vision Express 3.0.1.4,
and NeroMIX 1.4.0.25.
- NVIDIA Forceware 70.41 Beta - Techconnect Magazine let us know they
have
a new Forceware 70.41 beta driver online. This one comes from a test at
OSNN and features new improvements and other enhanced thing.
- ATI Optimized Driver v1.6a - These are
modified/hacked
ATI Catalyst drivers based on the offical Catalyst 4.11beta (8.07b2). The
drivers have been optimized with two things in mind, better Image Quality and
more/stable frames per second when compared to the official Catalyst drivers
from ATI.
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