Saturday Tech Madness - tech
(hx) 10:52 PM CEST - Sep,25 2004
- Post a comment / read (2)
- Jail time for California file swappers? - California Gov. Arnold
Schwarzenegger signed a law Tuesday establishing
fines and potential jail time for anonymous file swappers.The new law says
that any California resident who sends copyrighted works without permission to
at least 10 other people must include his or her e-mail address and the title
of the work. Swappers who do not include this information will face fines of
up to $2,500 and up to one year in prison.
- Hackers use Google to access photocopiers -
Using Google hacks -- requests typed into the search engine that bring up
cached information on networks -- hackers are discovering and using login
details for networked photocopiers so they can watch what is being copied.
"You don't have to be a genius to do this," said Jason Hart, security director
at Whitehat UK. "You can see what people are photocopying on your monitor. You
just have to search for online devices on Google."
- Virus writers hit home PCs as companies get tough -
Virus writers are
increasingly targeting poorly protected home PCs because company defences
are proving too much of a challenge. Vincent Gullotto, vice president of the
Anti-Virus Emergency Response Team (Avert) at security company McAfee, said
recent attacks have ignored corporate networks and aimed for the home user
instead.
- BSA Pursuing 700 Software-Piracy Probes - The Business Software
Alliance, the chief watchdog for U.S. software publishers, rarely raids
enterprise customers with federal marshals and court orders, according to
Robert M. Kruger, chief enforcement officer for the Washington, D.C.-based
nonprofit organization. But that doesn't mean Kruger and other BSA piracy cops
are easing up on their investigations. Even though the incidence of software
piracy worldwide has dropped,
the BSA still has 700 active investigations into software piracy across
the United States, says Kruger.
- GDI+ JPEG Remote Exploit -
Exploit based on FoToZ exploit but kicks the exploit up a notch by making
it have reverse connectback as well as bind features that will work with all
NT based OS's. WinNT, WinXP, Win2K, Win2003, etc... Thank you FoToz for
helping get a grip on the situation. I actually had got bind jpeg exploit
working earlier but I could only trigger from OllyDbg due to the heap
dynamically changing...
- Scanner Tool Released To Thwart JPEG Attack - Microsoft has
released a scanning tool to help users identify vulnerable versions of the GDI
libraries that handle JPEG processing.
The Microsoft GDI+ Detection Tool helps detect the presence of non-Windows
Microsoft products that contain the GDI+ component and determines whether a
security fix should be applied.
- Choosing an alternative browser -
This article will discus about why it is important, and what the main
choices are.
- Off-topic: Economist 2004 Innovation Awards - As such, each year,
The Economist recognises
individuals who have proved their talent in their respective fields 1)
Bio-Science : David Goeddel - for work with gene cloning and the expression of
human proteins 2) Communications : Vic Hayes - for work as founder of the IEEE
802.11 working group, and his efforts with WIFI. 3) Computing : Linus Torvalds
- for extensive work on the Linux operating system. 4) Energy : Takeshi
Uchiyamada - for work on the Toyota Prius (a hybrid fuel car). 5) "No
Boundaries" : Gerd Binnig, Heinrich Rohrer, Christoph Gerber - for work with
IBM on scanning-tunnelling microscopes (STM). 6) Social and Economic
Innovation : Muhammad Yunus - for work in banks in 3rd world countries;
masterminded the idea of "micro-credit".
- Off-topic: The Jobs Crunch - Neither major party is accurately
describing or combatting the Jobs Crunch that Americans are facing. Bad
immigration policy-and bad trade deals are combining to decimate the middle
class in America. (thanks
Slashdot.org)
- Off-topic: Montreal team offers build-your-own solar scooters - A
couple of entrepreneurs in Montreal are teaching people how to build their own
solar-powered scooters by making the instructions freely available on the
internet. Many people are looking to alternative fuels but solar-powered
vehicles are often too expensive. "The total cost of the project was probably
about $600,000," said Paul Glass, project manager for McGill University's
solar car. The Biomod company in Montreal said it can build the vehicles for
much cheaper. By using surplus parts,
a solar-powered scooter costs $1,600.
- Off-topic: Hard drive costs now under 10 cents per MB - The first
hard drive in 1956 was the IBM 305 RAMAC, and cost $10,000 per MB – it had a
capacity of 5MB. But now the cost, Fox said, is something
under 10
cents per MB and that he said, is a retail figure, including tax.
- Off-topic: Biggest cosmic collision - An international team of
scientists have discovered
a head-on collision of two galaxy clusters, one of the most powerful
collisions ever documented, China Radio International reported Saturday.
cientists have called it the"perfect cosmic storm." The galaxy clusters
collided like two hurricanes, tossing individual galaxies out into space.
- New Longhorn Concept Video - This
video covers technology to be delivered in 2005, as well as demonstrating
platform advances coming in Longhorn in 2006.
- Xbox 2 Peripherals to Work on PCs - Gamespot has posted
an interview with Microsoft Windows Graphics and Gaming general manager Dean
Lester where he reveals that the Xbox 2 peripherals will all work on PC
too. So it looks like the Xbox 2 will probably the regular USB standard.
- Xbox Next could support Xbox games - Xbox specialist site
xbox-scene.com reports that Transitive has announced QuickTransit, an
application that
would allow for software to be run across different processors and
operating systems without any source code changes -- boasting "100 per cent
functionality, transparent interactive and graphics performance" and
"near-native computational performance."
- Xbox Adds Video Chat Service - Microsoft is looking to
several anticipated titles, its online gaming service,
and a new video chat application to propel sales of its Xbox console in
Japan during the year-end shopping season.
- Gamers Get a Look at PlayStation Portable - Gamers got their first
chance to lay their hands on Sony Computer Entertainment's
highly-anciticipated PlayStation Portable (PSP) at the Tokyo Game Show this
week
and initial reactions were mostly positive. People who already own a
PlayStation 2 (PS2) say the PSP faithfully translates the larger console's
environment. "The performance is quite incredible and the buttons are
comfortable. ... It's just like the PS2," says Cody Pang, a 30-year-old gamer
who traveled to the show from Hong Kong.
- Game puts players in Kerry's boat - Military game specialist Kuma
Reality Games will let players make up their own answers in a couple of weeks,
when it releases a new adventure based on presidential candidate John Kerry's
Vietnam War service. "Silver Star" will be the latest in a string of missions
for "Kuma War," an ongoing game based on historical events.
The
Kerry mission, to be released Sept. 30, centers on the Feb. 28, 1969,
battle that earned the presidential candidate the nation's second-highest
military honor, while he commanded a Navy "swift boat" in the Mekong Delta.
- Nokia 6670 smartphone challenges PDAs - Nokia has launched
a new handset
with a 1 megapixel camera, claiming that the market is moving from PDAs to
smartphones. The tri-band Nokia 6670, which includes Bluetooth support, is
expected to be available from October.
- Nvidia Presentations Leak - Neowin's Forum has
offers some presentations slides from Nvidia where they slag off ATI's
Radeon 9250, 9550 and X700.
- VIA announces K8T890 PCIe chipset for the AMD 64 - VIA Technologies
has announced
the VIA K8T890 chipset, enabling advanced PCI Express (PCIe) connectivity
on motherboards for the latest AMD Athlon 64, Opteron, and Sempron processors.
The VIA K8T890 chipset is designed to fully accommodate the increased
multimedia demands being placed on the PC through applications such as
high-definition video creation, multi-streaming audio and the latest 3D-game
engines that require ever-increasing levels of system bandwidth. Featuring the
unique VIA Flex Express architecture, the VIA K8T890 chipset provides support
for the latest high performance PCI Express x16 graphics cards, benefiting
from a blistering 4GB/s of bandwidth, both upstream and downstream. The first
previews can be found on
TechReport,
PCPerspective,
BitTech,
HotHardware
- Systemax TourBook 5202 2GHz Centrino review -
The processor has been upgraded to a 2GHz Pentium M with 2MB of Level 2
cache, but the system memory remains at 512MB. The graphics card has been
given a boost and you now get a Mobility Radeon 9700 instead of the 9600, but
the graphics memory remains at 64MB.
- 90-nano Athlon 64 3500+ review - Korean website PC-Web has posted a
review
(translate with
Babelfish) of AMD's 90-nanometer "Winchester" Athlon 64 3500+
- PQI PC3200 1024DBU RAM review -
The PQI3200-1024DPU is a matched pair dual channel 512MB DDR 400MHz PC3200
TURBO module. Capable of achieving ultra-low latency 2-2-2-5, PQI3200-1024DPU
optimizes overall system performance with superior stability.
- OCZ's PC-3200 Platinum Rev.2 review - From DDR400 to DDR530,
OCZ's EL rev2 pc3200 displayed consistent speeds, which is astounding for
memory that claims to be a humble DDR400. In other words, the ram is truly a
Jack of all trades. With a superior overclocking rate, OCZ's EL PC-3200 has
truly impressed me. It is not often that you'll see a ram that can run at
Cas2, 3-3-5, moreover at high frequencies such as PC4400.
- Corsair 1GB PC2 5400 Pro DDR2 review -
For those of you upgrading to a DDR2 platform, this Corsair PC2 5400 is
going to be the memory to have. It has plenty of headroom to push your CPU as
far as you want and still have room left over. Granted, it is a bit on the
pricey side, but if you've got the dough, it's more than worth it. As Intel's
new chipsets continue to be improved upon and mature, I'm sure we'll be seeing
much better overclocking capabilities from them and I have no doubt this
memory is going to be the overclockers choice.
- GALAXY Glacier GeForce 6800 128MB - The oversized VGA
silencer carries the two-fold benefit of reducing core temperature and fan
speed.
GALAXY's obviously confident enough with Arctic Cooling's efforts to
warrant a 15/25MHz (depending on whether you consider 325MHz or 335MHz the
default 6800 speed) increase over reference models. GALAXY Technology also
adds in some super-fast Hynix DDR1 RAM, rated to a nominal 900MHz, yet chooses
to go with NVIDIA's 700MHz RAM speed recommendations.
- ASUS V9999 Gamer Edition review -
Performance of the Asus V9999GE videocard was excellent for the most part,
but that is to be expected considering it's using a GeForce 6800 GPU. ;-) In
almost all benchmarks, the V9999GE fought it out for top spot with the Asus
AX800XT/TVD and Albatron GeForce 6800GT.
- Albatron GeForce PCX5750 review - Other than its overclocking
prowess, the PCX5750 from Albatron
does not
offer a lot of bells or whistles, which is what we should probably expect
from a mid-range video card. Duke Nukem and a disc full of demos does not
offer too much of a compelling reason to buy this board instead of a
competitor's. However, the cooler that covers the core and the memory chips on
the front of the board seems to be offered by only a couple different vendors,
so that is definitely a feature that helps differentiate this board.
Unfortunately, the memory chips on the back do not have heatsinks on them.
- Leadtek WinFast PVR2000 review -
The PVR2000 is Leadtek's latest PC TV tuner card and it is a real bundle
of tricks. As well as the compulsory antenna or cable transmitted programmes
and Teletext, the PVR2000 also has a built-in hardware MPEG2 Encoder which
takes significant strain off the CPU and can capture in MPEG1, MPEG2, VCD and
DVD formats, as well as burning directly to a DVD.
- Gigabyte Radeon X800 Pro review- Good news for Small Form factor
owners,
these cards are rather cool during their operations and the heatsink fan
occupy only a single slot unlike the GeForce 6800Ultra that take up two slots.
Since the fan speed varies according to the temperature of the core, most of
the time the fan was spinning at low rpm. Although the fan is huge, it is
still less noisy than the blower fan found in GeForce 6800Ultra.
- External Audio Adapters roundup - ExtremeTech take a loot at
eight audio products that think outside the box.
- Altec Lansing MX5021 Speaker System review -
The MX5021
fits the need for those of you who are looking for something that sounds as
good as it looks. It's not a boring-looking piece of equipment - it's sleek
and elegant. Since you can use the MX5021 as home theater speakers as well,
you can stretch your investment by having it perform double duty by the
computer and in the living room.
- NIRO 1.1 PRO DVD/Receiver-Speaker System (HTIB) and MovieMouse -
The 1.1PRO system (MSRP $799) reviewed here is the little brother of the
Two6.1 system - both of which are Home Theaters in a Box - HTIB - and uses
only one speaker enclosure to do the surround job. Surely, this simplifies the
system setup further, but it also brings up an obvious question: how realistic
a surround effect can this system deliver with only one speaker enclosure?
Also it would be interesting to see how it compares with the Two6.1 system.
- Logitech MX 1000 review - THG
dissects both laser and mouse to see whether or not laser technology will
eventually render traditional optical mice obsolete.
- Xtrac Eels & Mad Dotz Mouse Enhancers - Mad Dotz is a slightly more
elaborate approach though at the very basic level no different from the Eels.
Instead of having to cut the pieces to size,
you get 12 precut portions that'll fit any mouse with room to spare. Of
course if you really wanted to size them down, there'd be nothing preventing
you from doing so. They're also a lot easier to peel off and the adhesive
feels a bit stickier than that of the Eels'. Furthermore, you get a handy
isopropyl alcohol pad to clean off your mouse feet before installation.
- 20 tips to keep your temperatures low -
check it
out.
- Catalyst A.I. - The future of optimisations? -
EliteBastards tested this new feature from both an image quality and
performance standpoint, running benchmarks on not only a Radeon X800 XT, but
also the older Radeon 9800 Pro, to see what advantages they would both garner
from this added functionality.
- MacOSX Transformation Pack 1.0 beta - This is the first beta of the
new
MacOSX Transformation Pack for Windows. With this program you can
transform your Windows to MacOSX without having to install all kinds of other
tools. This pack works only on Windows XP with SP2 and Windows Media Center
2004 with SP2.
- PHP 5.0.2 - PHP Development Team is proud to announce
the immediate
release of PHP 5.0.2 (changelog).
This is a maintenance release that in addition to many non-critical bug fixes,
addresses a problem with GPC input processing. All Users of PHP 5 are
encouraged to upgrade to this release as soon as possible.
- Maxthon (MyIE2) v1.1.035 Beta -
Maxthon (MyIE2) (download)
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.
- Real Alternative 1.25a -
Real Alternative
will allow you to play RealMedia files without having to install RealPlayer or
RealOne Player. Supported are: RealAudio (.ra .rpm), RealMedia (.rm .ram .rmvb
.rpx .smi .smil), RealText (.rt), ReadPix (.rp). It also supports RealMedia
content that is embedded in webpages
- Google Toolbar 2.0.114.5 -
The Google Toolbar
(download
win9x/me ~
winxp/2k) increases your ability to find information from anywhere on the
web and takes only seconds to install. When the Google Toolbar is installed,
it automatically appears along with the Internet Explorer toolbar.
- AutoGK 1.60 Stable -
AutoGK is a very simple and powerfull tool for making dvd rips
- DiscJuggler 4.10.1151 -
DiscJuggler (demo)
can simultaneously drive multiple CD recorders and replicate virtually any
standard CD. It features direct digital-to-digital CD duplication from a
CD-ROM drive to multiple CD-R drives, audio CD duplication with support for PQ
and R-W subcodes, and on-the-fly audio stream resynchronization, and
on-the-fly software regeneration of ECC/EDC and scrambling. This new version
adds support for DVD+R Dual Layer and 5x DVD-RAM.
- Adobe Reader SpeedUp 1.29 -
Adobe Reader SpeedUp
(download)
is a simple application that was created to help make the loading time of
Adobe's Acrobat/Reader software bearable for everyday use.
- Fresh Download 7.14 -
Fresh Download (download)
is an easy-to-use and very fast download manager software that turbo charges
downloading files from the Internet, such as your favorite software, mp3
files, video files, picture collections, etc. Unlike any other similar
utilities, this software is 100% free, no charges, no banners in the software,
no spyware.
- K-Lite Mega Codec Pack 1.12 -
The K-Lite Mega Codec Pack includes the K-Lite Codec Pack Full, QuickTime
Alternative, Real Alternative, Bink and Smacker playback support and Monkey's
Audio DirectShow decoder.
- K-Lite Codec Pack 2.32 -
K-Lite Codec Pack 2.30 (download)
includes: updated Vorbis DLLs to version 1.1.0., updated GSpot to version 2.52
beta 1 build 2004-09-15, auto set the correct DirectX related settings for
Media Player Classic and added option to boost the AC3 volume.
- nVHardPage v2.1 - Do you seek
an easy way
to en/disable overclocking options or vsync option in your detonator
drivers without the burden of importing registry entries or the need to go in
that registry yourself.
- Lite-On IT firmware - Lite-On IT has today released several
new firmware releases for
SOHW-832S(X)
VS0B,
LDW-851S(X) GS0M,
LDW-451S GSBA,
and
SOHC-5232K(X) NK0E. In addition,
codeguys.rpc1.org have some hacked firmwares, firmware mod tools and
custom firmwares extending the drives capabilities.
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Updated:10:44 AM CEST Sep,20
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